Intro, and am I in the right room?

Hi all - 
 
My name is Michael Boyink, and I'm an independent consultant from West
Michigan..  I've been subscribed to the group for some time now - having
originally subscribed to learn more about the list topic as it pertained
to website navigation as it seemed to be a more powerful way to present
complex content.
 
I'm now bumping into a project that feels related in a different way,
and I need to see if I'm "in the right room".
 
Let me see if I can stay on the lawyer-friendly side of the NDA I
signed, and give you enough information to provide any insight.  I have
a client that manufactures a complex, highly configurable product.
Their product comprises several product lines.  These product lines all
share traits, but have differing amounts of those traits.  They want to
provide a tool to browse typical configurations of their products based
on the users selecting which amounts of each trait they are interested
in.
 
For example, if this client was an auto manufacturer, picture a tool
where you could go and see a picture of a car.  Under that car is a
"graphic equalizer" arrangement of sliders, labeled "Horsepower",
"Towing Capacity", "Passenger Space", "Price", "Utility" etc.  As you
choose a slider and adjust it, the picture of the car would change to a
different model from that manufacturer.  If you slid "Towing Capacity"
high, and "Passenger Space" low, the interface might present you a truck
rather than a car, etc.
 
This almost feels like "multifaceted browsing" rather than "multifaceted
classification", but my gut feeling is that they are related at the root
level, and possibly just a different interface running on the same
dataset.
 
So first of all, am I in the right room here?  Has anyone seen or built
such an interface?  Would some of the tools discussed on this list be a
good starting point for developing this sort of thing?
 
TIA,

Mike Boyink
Holland, MI
 <http://www.boyink.com/> http://www.boyink.com 
 


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