Faceted Browsing and the Semantic Web
It looks like everybody and their dog is writing faceted browsers these days.
Benjamin Nowack announced one a few days ago on the crunchbase mailing list, and David Huynh announced a “novel” way of browsing graph structured data based on sets on the swig mailing list.
Good that Michiel Hildebrand noted that set-based browsing existed before, in /facet and Eyal Oren’s work. Our own SWSE system, in fact, had set-based focus change in its first incarnation more than a year ago.
We removed that functionality for the current SWSE interface, because users didn’t seem to get what’s going on. But it looks like there’s some new design ideas to build an interaction model that is intuitive. Or we just have to be more picky about our users…
September 4th, 2008 at 14:15
Microsoft has acquired a patent for faceted browsing decades ago. do not re-invent the wheel, for God’s sake.
September 4th, 2008 at 23:31
I was not aware that faceted browsing was decades old. IIRC Marti Hearst said she thinks faceted browsing is not patented.
Would you be able to point me to 1) the patent and 2) a large-scale faceted browsing system over Web data? Hint: live.com is not it.
September 30th, 2008 at 17:51
Faceted browsing is based on facet theory that was firstly described by S. R. Ranganathan in 1962 as a library classification methodology. You can find the reference in http://iswc2006.semanticweb.org/items/Oren2006nx.pdf.