Faceted Browsing
A. What is faceted browsing?
Unlike a simple hierarchical scheme, faceted classification gives the users the ability to find items based on more than one dimension. This is becoming a popular and useful way to narrow large results sets and make the different types of metadata more easily seen and used.
- faceted classification – wikipedia article
- innovation in classification – peterme.com
(see 2nd and 3rd paragraphs for useful definition of FC) - use of faceted classification – webdesignpractices.com
- useful collection of links about faceted browsing – Keith Instone
B. Examples
- restaurant guide – Boston restaurants, openlist.com
- recipe browse – Epicurious
- hardware vendors – search for digital cameras at GovConnection.com
- books in libraries – RedLightGreen
- Flamenco Fine Arts Search – images from fine arts museums, San Francisco, more Flamenco demos
- our licensed databases, such as Compendex
- browse Forrester Research
- Dublic Core Metadata Initiative conference papers
- Ebay Express
C. Software for faceted browse systems
D. Future directions
- what if we applied faceted browsing to our database listings?
mockup of a “database discovery tool” - faceted browsing for library catalogs:
NCSU library catalog – link to search results for “global warming”
browse by subject
E. Further reading
See “faceted browsing” section of the Bibliography.