Faceted Browsing
Faceted Browsing is one way to use a Faceted Classification system to allow users to find information.
The key elements of a Faceted Browsing system are that:
- users filter a set of items by progressively selecting from only valid values
- the list of valid values are filtered to only show those that do have results available
- results are displayed as soon as possible
- it is impossible to get an empty result
- any facet can be chosen as a starting point
- it sits on top of a Faceted Classification system
- it does not involve entering keywords
Sites with FacetedBrowsing
- [FacetMap]
- TravisWilson has built FacetMap, a demo that shows how to combine faceted classification, regarded as a “bottom-up” system, with the hierarchical navigation that’s typically considered a “top-down” structure, thereby giving (unsuspecting) users much more power over their browsing. The site lets you upload your own data to see how it can be browsed using the facetmap system.
- [eToys]
- Categories include age, gender, category, character, brand. This has a neat way of ‘removing’ a selected facet.
- [Epicurious]
- Almost a classic example. Categories include main ingredient, preparation, cuisine, season, course, special considerations.
- [New York Citysearch restaurants]
- The main categories are Neighborhood, Cuisine, Price and features. You can either browse or do a keyword search and use the facets to filter. The implementation isn’t great. You can’t see what you have filtered on, can’t remove a category.
- [The Berkeley FlamencoProject]
- FLexible information Access using MEtadata in Novel COmbinations. Includes a number of [articles] and a [working proof of using faceted metadata for an image library search]. PeterMe has a [blog entry] discussing this.
- [epinions.com]
- epinions.com uses FacetedBrowsing to refine browse results for many products. Each product type has a different number of selections before further refinement is unavailable.
- [IBM’s Product Finder]
- Categories for notebooks include travel weight, display size, operating system, price, processor, availability, wireless, memory, hard drive. Some of the categories include overlapping ranges (less than $1000, less than $2000).
- [Televisions on MSN shopping]
- Only includes categories of price and brand. Does an odd thing with category – initial ranges are broad, when one is chosen there is an option to narrow the range. Not very well communicated in the interface.
- [DC-2003 Conference Proceedings]
- There really isn’t enough content in this one – most of the facets have only a few relevant documents. Perhaps it is just too granular.
- [Recipes by SeaMark – Siderean]
- A recipe demo that leads to content on epicurious
- [CompUSA.com]
- CompUSA?.com have FacetedBrowsing for many of their product categories. Many of the facets have sub-facets.
- [Metagroup parametric search]
- This meets all the criteria of faceted browse. It uses a set of drop-down boxes to select topics and displays results after each selection. I must say, it’s the ugliestFacetedBrowsing interface I have ever seen.
- [Digital Web Magazine]
- DigitalWebMagazine uses FacetedBrowsing for locating articles by date, author, title, type, and topic.
- Comment – no, this is not faceted browsing, this is just using some metadata to allow readers to access content in different ways. There is no filtering – you can only go down one level and you’re at a list of content.
- [Faceted Taxonomies Demo]
- I have created a demo of “Faceted Taxonomies” for a nursing department of a hospital in Singapore using FacetMap.
- I call it “Faceted Taxonomies” as each facet is like a taxonomy,except for the date and audience,which could be
- hierarchically structured.It is called “faceted” as the various taxonomies are different aspect of the nursing
- domain and it supports faceted browsing.