Re: NOT SPAM: a request for information!

Bob- The amount of work depends on how much metadata is available to 
the application developer, and how it lends itself to use in a 
faceted retrieval scheme. One observation to be made based on our 
experience is that there is far more metadata to be leveraged for 
this kind of application than people tend to assume.

In many commercial applications, we find that a significant amount 
of effort has already been spent in record classification by 
database designers and administrators. This existing metadata can be 
leveraged in a faceted retrieval system. For example, in an 
ecommerce catalog, products are often already classified by product 
type/category, target customer, price range, etc. In our system, we 
simple provide a way to automatically connect to relational tables 
containing such data, transform it into an RDF representation, and 
then automatically generate a navigation interface on top of the 
unified representation. In this way, a usable faceted search system 
can be generated in a few man-hours or less.

We also find simple Dublin Core metadata, which is readily available 
through many content management systems, can be fruitfully exploited 
to provide faceted search over tagged content. While this is not a 
faceted classification scheme in the traditional sense of a set of 
facets crafted for a specific set of end-user retrieval needs, it 
can nevertheless provide more usable navigation than is possible 
with traditional free text or parametric retrieval approaches. 
Coupled with named entity and noun phrase extraction techniques, 
this can lead to a point of departure for crafting a more 
sophisticated faceted classification scheme, while in the short term 
providing real benefit to users.

With the proliferation of XML-based approaches to content management 
(particularly those associated with weblog management systems), the 
amount of metadata that can be leveraged to build faceted schemes 
will continue to expand. Again, in our system, one transforms the 
metadata available in XML feeds and/or repositories into an RDF 
representation and continues from there.

In many cases, however, the intellectual effort of creating a 
classification scheme, specifying facets and providing a framework 
for a combination of human- and machine-generated metadata creation 
and harvesting will need to be performed. However, our intent is to 
provide tools that will, through the use of standards such as RDF, 
provide a framework so that such efforts can be easily shared, 
reused and propagated through the agency of the Semantic Web.  Our 
goal is to allow information architects to write RDF to create 
working navigation systems in precisely the same way web page 
designers write HTML to create web pages. In doing so, we can 
make "view source" work for information architectures in a manner 
analogous to the way it works for web pages today. 

For example, if you go to the DC-2002 example cited in my previous 
post, you'll see an "RDF Metadata" button in the lower left hand 
corner of the page. Clicking on that link will show you the source 
RDF that defines the running navigation application. It contains a 
simple controlled vocabulary using Z39.19 standards, a temporal 
hierarchy, a simple classification scheme for conference events, and 
the presentation metadata records. This took about a day to put 
together based on the raw material on the conference website. By 
providing the RDF representation directly, it now becomes possible 
for others to reuse the scheme to apply it to other collections and 
extend it for other uses.

In summary, there are a number of tools and approaches that we use 
to assist in the classification process:

- Extract metadata directly from relational databases and XML feeds;
- Support incremental development of a faceted classification from 
an initial set of Dublin Core metadata
- Use named entity and noun phrase extraction tools to create 
subjects from unstructured content;
- Author, aggregate and reuse existing RDF representations of 
vocabularies and classification schemes

regards, BPA


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