Broad and flat vs hierarchical facets - beginning with introducing myself

As someone who has recently joined this list I am seeking some
information from people who have pragmatic experience implementing
faceted classifications - but first an introduction and background.

I am currently working in the Australian defence industry as a
documentation and knowledge management systems analyst. I earned my PhD
in evolutionary biology in 1973 (where systematics was a major part of
my doctoral research). 

Throughout my academic career I had a particular bent information
science, and often explained to librarians how the various computerised
indexing systems worked. I am familiar with Ranganathan and a variety of
other indexing schemes used in library environments.

After reaching an academic dead-end around 1980 I ended up in the
computer industry as a technical writer, documentation manager,
documentation systems analyst and designer, and am currently working
with enterprise knowledge management systems - still more or less in
analysis and design roles. Since 1990 I have been working exclusively
within Tenix Defence (and its predecessor companies). Tenix is a
privately held company and is Australia's largest defence prime
contractor. We are currently finishing the $A 6 BN fixed price ANZAC
Ship Project to build 10 frigates - 8 for Australia and 2 for New
Zealand.

From a theoretical point of view I am interested in the roles of data,
information and knowledge management technologies as extensions to human
and organizational cognition. A summary of what I have been working on
is available on the Web: Hall, W.P. (2003). Working Towards Biologically
Based Theories of Organization and Knowledge to Understand How
Organizations Work Best. Joint Lunchtime Seminar, 08/09/03, Rutherford
House, Wellington. New Zealand Knowledge Management Network and
Government Information Systems Forum.
[http://www.nzkm.net/assets/NZKMNetGovis(1).pdf]

Which brings me to what I am doing at the moment.

We have implemented OpenText's LiveLink application as a corporate
intranet portal, where I am trying to implement a classification
structure that engineers, office staff, project managers, commercial
people and the like can apply to objects they place in the system
(documents, people's contact details and specialities, registration and
location of paper files, etc.), and that can then be used by the same
people to intelligently retrieve information from the system.

I'm convinced that no one dimensional classification system can cope -
especially where people applying the classification metadata are not
skilled records managers. Facets seem to be the way to go - and appear
to be well within the capabilities of our platform to apply and search
by in a user-friendly way using LiveLink's "categories" and/or the
"classification" addin module.

Our current prototype includes 7 independent facets - where we expect
users to apply only those facets that are relevant to a particular
object being classified: 

o  Business Unit (object relating to a particular business unit), 
o  Other Organisation (e.g., document source, party in a contract, etc.)
o  Project Name/ID (most of what we do relates to an internal or
external project)
o  Project Lifecycle Phase (we are implementing a project lifecycle
management methodology based on PMBoK so this should be meaningful to
many of our users)
o  Subject Matter (e.g., type of content from a functional point of
view)
o  Document/Object Type (in principle our system can point to a person
as well as it can a document)
o  Discipline (e.g., legal, engineering, H/R, etc.).

The intention is that all selections of identifiers in each facet either
to apply an object or to search will be made from picklists (these are
also easy to create and maintain). My problem is that some of the lists
(e.g., projects, other organizations) may have thousands of items. My
hope (yet to be fully verified) is that we can implement the
classifications module such that choices can be made in a hierarchical
fashion. By limiting search to the Boolean intersection of several
facets - retrieval can be quite precise even where reasonably general
terms are used.

My questions to the list is for pragmatic experience re 

1. What is the practical maximum number of items that can be included in
a flat (alpha or logically sorted) picklist before users won't use it or
can't find the item they are looking for?

2. In a hierarchical picklist, how many layers are considered to be
practical and what is the practical maximum number of items that should
be presented in a layer (assuming that the hierarchical logic allows
much freedom to go flat vs deep)? 

Other experience-based comments based on working with systems like I
have described would be welcome.

Many thanks,

Bill Hall

Documentation Systems Analyst
Head Office, Engineering
Tenix Defense
Williamstown, Vic. 3016
Phone: 03 9244 4820
Email:[email protected]
URL: http://www.tenix.com

Honorary Research Fellow
Knowledge Management Lab
School of Information Management & Systems
Monash University
Caulfield East, Vic. 3145
URL: http://www.sims.monash.edu.au/research/km/
 


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