Boot camp - Faceted navigation

The Taxonomy Boot Camp (November 2-3, 2006, San Jose, CA, USA) includes 2 back-to-back sessions on faceted navigation.

Semi-Automated Creation of Faceted Hierarchies, Marti Hearst, Professor, School of Information, University of California, Berkeley

Faceted navigation for information collections is gaining wide acceptance. However, a considerable impediment to the wider adoption of faceted interfaces is the creation of the faceted hierarchies and the assignments of terms from the hierarchies to the information items. Marti Hearst and her colleague, Emilia Stoica have designed an algorithm called Castanet that semiautomatically generates hierarchical faceted metadata from textual description of items. Using an existing lexical database (such as WordNet), the algorithm carves out a structure that reflects the contents of the target information collection. Learn how the algorithm has been successfully applied to collections as diverse as recipes, biomedical journal titles, and art history image descriptions. The resulting category hierarchies require only small adjustments to achieve intuitive results with good coverage.

Getting the Best of Both: Taxonomies & Faceted Navigation, Tom Reamy, Chief Knowledge Architect, KAPS Group

Faceted navigation has been getting a lot of press, but it is important to understand what facets really are, how facets are different from categories, and how to combine facets and categories to create powerful but easy-to-use information access. The right balance of taxonomies and facets combines the best of browsing and advanced search in ways that users will actually use. This session presents the results of a recent project that combined two standard hierarchical taxonomies and then set up a mechanism for dynamically mapping them across two facet dimensions to enable users to zero in on content faster and easier than with just facets or categories.

I am sure I will not be able to go, but if you do attend, let me know what you learn. It is great to see detailed concepts related to faceted finding, searching and browsing being covered. This is more than just "fun" now.