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

[Donna M. Fritzsche]

>lated 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.

It is always the case that the values of given 
attributes/facets/parameters have relationships to each other. 
Otherwise they would not be useful in describing a given object.

The fact that that structure has been pulled out and 
identified/formalized/described in a more definite manner (controlled 
vocab, thesaurus, ontology, semantic net, etc) is an independent 
topic from the browsing and search utitlity of the basic 
attribute/value structure which is part of many search/query/ and 
database systems.  The utility of the basic functionality of being 
able to search or retrieve based on the attribute/value paradigm is 
not changed by the introduction of a formal manner for representing 
the value space, although it may be enhanced.

My .02

Donna