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

[Jonathan Broad]

On Jun 16, 2004, at 9:54 AM, Tanya Rabourn wrote:

>
> Haven't had a chance to work with it yet, but I believe
> Verity's K2 allows the construction of a faceted browse.
> However they, like others in the search engine space, call
> it parametric browse. I've also heard it called parametric
> selection. I believe this is the same thing --
> faceted/parametric, but let me know if there's a subtle
> difference I'm not picking up on.
>

Tanya,

I think one difference between parametric search and what I consider 
full-blown faceted navigation/search is the complexity of the facets.  
Parametric search, as implemented by Verity (so far as I've been able 
to determine), seems limited to flat or single-valued facets.  Or at 
least, it should be. :)

My meager knowledge-engineering book-learning rebels a bit at extending 
the label of parametric search into complex faceted applications.   To 
me, a parameter is an attribute of something.  It's not a stretch to 
call both single-value and flat facets attributes, but when the value 
of an attribute is itself related to other terms in complex ways, you 
need a qualitatively different model to represent that.

You've gone beyond "parameters/attributes of x" at that point, because 
the values of the parameters themselves have attributes--parents, 
siblings, children, or even arbitrary relationships in the case of 
Topic Map representations.

I'm not sure that anybody's marketing department is going to buy that, 
though.  Even Endeca avoids the term "facets"--they call their system 
"guided navigation".

Jonathan


> -Tanya
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-----------------------------------
Jonathan Broad
jonathan at relativepath.org