Faceted search

Faceted search, also called faceted navigation or faceted browsing, is a technique for accessing a collection of information represented using a faceted classification, allowing users to explore by filtering available information. A faceted classification system allows the assignment of multiple classifications to an object, enabling the classifications to be ordered in multiple ways, rather than in a single, pre-determined, taxonomic order. Each facet typically corresponds to the possible values of a property common to a set of digital objects.

Facets are often derived by analysis of the text of an item using entity extraction techniques or from pre-existing fields in the database such as author, descriptor, language, and format. This approach permits existing web-pages, product descriptions or articles to have this extra metadata extracted and presented as a navigation facet.

Development

The Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval provided the following description of the role of Faceted Search for a 2006 workshop:

The web search world, since its very beginning, has offered two paradigms:

• Navigational search uses a hierarchy structure (taxonomy) to enable users to browse the information space by iteratively narrowing the scope of their quest in a predetermined order, as exemplified by Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ, etc.
• Direct search allows users to simply write their queries as a bag of words in a text box. This approach has been made enormously popular by Web search engines.

Over the last few years, the direct search paradigm has gained dominance and the navigational approach became less and less popular. Recently a new approach has emerged, combining both paradigms, namely the faceted search approach. Faceted search enables users to navigate a multi-dimensional information space by combining text search with a progressive narrowing of choices in each dimension. It has become the prevailing user interaction mechanism in e-commerce sites and is being extended to deal with semi-structured data, continuous dimensions, and folksonomies.

Academic work

Within the academic community, faceted search has attracted interest primarily among library and information science researchers, and to some extent among computer science researchers specializing in information retrieval.

Major academic efforts in faceted search include the following:

• Research on view-based systems, led by Steve Pollitt at the University of Huddersfield.

• The Flamenco project, led by Marti Hearst at the University of California, Berkeley.

• The Relation Browser project, led by Gary Marchionini at the University of North Carolina.

• The Haystack and SIMILE projects, led by David Karger at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

• The mSpace project, led by m.c. schraefel at the University of Southampton.

• The CiteSeerX project at the Pennsylvania State University allows faceted search for academic documents and continues to expand into other facets such as table search.

Mass market use

Faceted search has become a popular technique in commercial search applications, particularly for online retailers and libraries. An increasing number of enterprise search vendors provide software for implementing faceted search applications.

Online retail

Online retail catalogs were among the earliest applications of faceted search, reflecting both the faceted nature of product data (i.e., most products have a type, brand, price, etc.) and the ready availability of the data in retailers' existing information systems. In the early 2000s, retailers started using faceted search, leading to its ubiquity today on their online storefronts.

Libraries

Although the noted librarian Ranganathan was a strong proponent of a faceted classification system for library materials, he did not succeed in replacing the pre-coordinated Dewey Decimal Classification system with his faceted colon classification scheme. Nonetheless, online library catalogs, also known as OPACs, have increasingly adopted faceted search interfaces. Noted examples include the North Carolina State University library catalog (part of the Triangle Research Libraries Network) and the OCLC Open WorldCat system.

See also

• Exploratory search
• Human–computer information retrieval

References

• Allen, R.B., Navigating and searching in digital library catalogs. Proceedings Digital Libraries '94, (College Station, TX, June 1994), 95-100.
• Allen, R.B., Retrieval from facet spaces, Electronic Publishing, 247-257, 8, 1996.
• Bénel A., Calabretto S., Pinon J.-M., Iacovella A., Vers un outil documentaire unifié pour les chercheurs en archéologie, Actes du XVIIIe congrès INFORSID, Lyon, 16-19 Mai 2000. pp. 133–145.
• Bénel A., Calabretto S., Iacovella A., Pinon J.-M., Porphyry 2001: Semantics for scholarly publications retrieval, Proceedings of the thirteenth International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems [ISMIS], Lyon, June 26–29, 2002. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence no. 2366. Berlin : Springer-Verlag. 2002. pp. 351–361.
• Hearst, M. A., English, J., Sinha, R., Swearingen, K., and Yee, K.-P. Finding the flow in web site search. Communications of the ACM, 45(9), September 2002.
• Karger, D. R. and Quan, D. 2004. Haystack: a user interface for creating, browsing, and organizing arbitrary semistructured information. In CHI '04 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Vienna, Austria, April 24–29, 2004). CHI '04. ACM, New York, NY, 777-778.
• Pollitt A S, Ellis G P, Smith M P (1994) HIBROWSE for Bibliographic Databases Journal of Information Science, 20 (6), pp 413–426, December 1994.
• Zhang, J. and Marchionini, G. 2004. Coupling browse and search in highly interactive user interfaces: a study of the relation browser++. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Tucson, AZ, USA, June 7–11, 2004). JCDL '04. ACM, New York, NY, 384-384.
• Zhou C., Bénel A., From the crowd to communities: New interfaces for social tagging, Proceedings of the eighth international conference on the design of cooperative systems (COOP'08), May 20- 23, Carry-le-Rouet, 2008.

External links

• User Interface Implementations of Faceted Browsing
• Faceted Search: A faceted browser for the Drupal content management system.
• Daisy faceted browser: The faceted browser built into the Daisy content management system.
• Semantic Drilldown: A faceted search extension for Semantic MediaWiki.
• Slashfacet: A semantic web faceted browser that permits the structured browsing of Semantic Web content.
• Elastic lists: A demonstration of the elastic lists principle for facet browsing.
• Design Recommendations for Hierarchical Faceted Search Interfaces by Marti Hearst.
• UI's for Faceted Navigation by Marti Hearst
• Bobo-Browse - an open source faceted engine written in Java based on Apache Lucene by John Wang
• Faceted Search by Daniel Tunkelang: part of Morgan & Claypool Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services
• Apache Solr - An Apache Lucene based search server with faceting hosted by the Apache Software Foundation