[sigia-l] Faceted browsing WAS The category of "Miscellaneous"

[Jonathan Broad]

First, let me say that I'd be very interested in any information about 
alternatives to Endeca people might know about.  So far as I've been 
able to tell, it is just about the only provider of enterprise-scale 
faceted browsing.  Flamenco's open source project probably won't scale 
to the data set I'm currently working on (~500,000 items, with a 
~10-15,000 term controlled vocabulary).

On Jun 16, 2004, at 4:54 AM, Donna Maurer wrote:

> Having spent my day up to my elbows in faceted browsing (which also
> involved creating a new page on the IAwiki:
> http://iawiki.net/FacetedBrowsing), I wonder why you think that it
> eliminates the dead ends.
>
> All of the current implementations of faceted browsing I have found
> purposely lead to dead ends. Faceted browsing is a filter, and a filter
> is a funnel that progressively narrows the number of results down.
> You browse through the facets until you find a product/page that is
> interesting. Although it would be simple to use the facets to create
> relationships (and eliminate dead ends by expanding the results), I
> haven't seen this done at all.

Sorry for the mix-up:  by "dead end" I meant something similar to these 
aspects of FB noted on your wiki page:
  * users filter a set of items by progressively selecting from *only 
valid values*
*  it is impossible to get a *null result*
Endeca makes this elimination of "no results" (perhaps a better way of 
putting it) a central feature of their marketing.

But I think that both Endeca and the Flamenco interface allow you to 
shift strategies without needing to back up a hierarchical branch.   
Even the final result-page in the Flameno interface allows you to 
remove any currently applied facet, start a new search from any of the 
result's facet-values, or start a new search based on the ancestors of 
any applicable facets.

The basic idea of faceted browsing is the application of reductive 
filters, but all the implementations I've seen benefit from the ability 
to add or remove filters in any sequence, and at any stage in the 
search process.  Ideal for berry-picking.

Jonathan