[Sigia-l] Re: Facets vs. ontologies [was: Sigia-l] Findability - hierarchies

[Peter Van Dijck]

Lars Marius Garshol wrote:

> | I haven't seen any really good navigation widgets/systems for the
> | more advanced ontology structures - it is usually just see-also and
> | some ways of combining queries.
> 
> I can't show you any of our really good demos, but here's two weak
> examples that at least gives a hint of what can be done:
>   <URL: http://www.ontopia.net/i18n/index.jsp >
>   <URL: http://www.ontopia.net/operamap/index.jsp >

Nice. I like it.

> Admittedly you have to be a grammatologist (or crazy) to care about
> any of this, but don't see that faceted classification even allows you
> to dream of doing stuff like this.

You're converting me Lars.

> | Let's try:
> |
> | - Geography (facet)
> | -- Africa
> | --- Morocco
> | --- Nigeria
> | ---- Kano (assuming Kano is in Nigeria)
> | - Business areas (facet)
> | -- oil services
> | - departments
> | -- oil surveying
> | -- oil production
> | - type of location
> | -- office
> 
> This works, but is much weaker than an ontology. It also seems to
> become unwieldy as the "ontology" is extended with more facets, and
> you can't express the relationships between business areas and
> departments, and so on...

I see how you would think that coming from the ontology perspective (and
you would be right). Another way of looking at it is that Facet
*analysis* (figuring out how to divide the categories into facets) is
useful for designing complex structures (ontologies) as well as simpler
structures (hierarchical faceted trees of topics) and even for really
simple structures (one simple tree).

So I feel we agree: a hierarchical faceted classification structure is
better than a simple tree, but ontologies are a lot better still. Also:
more complex structures allow for more rich navigation - which is harder
to design.

PeterV