RE: Introducing myself

All,

Matt Eichner, work in a software company based in Cambridge called Endeca.
I was for part of my life the guy who spent a little too much time in
libraries or on computers, trying to find information.  I recently joined
Endeca after learning of their lineage - straight from Ranganthan and Taube,
two prominent library scientists - and Inktomi and Teradata, two companies
that grappled with searching structured and unstructured information.  

The key that excited me - how do we unlock the power of existing cataloging
/ structure to replicate, using a computer, the dialog we might have with a
trusted expert (e.g., a librarian, a concierge, etc.)?  I often think of it
as "user-defined relevance ranking" - rather than black-boxing the search
results process, returning options that empower the user to choose what's of
interest at a higher level than clicking through the massive list of results
one by one (often by exposing an organized collection of faceted metadata).
There is some good information science here - that we actually can't
articulate what we're looking for all that easily, even to another person,
and certainly not to a search box, without some prompting to "tease out" our
frame (e.g., Chen, H. & Dhar, V. (1990) User Misconceptions of Information
Retrieval Systems).

I was actually brought on to look at the library and information provider
spaces. I joined this group to learn more about faceted classification
efforts out there.  These can be a real contributing element for creating
the types of structure that "turbo-charge" Endeca's solution.  And Endeca
can unlock a lot of the value they create in some unique ways (I'm working
on getting the screen-shots posted - looking forward to hearing what
everyone thinks!)

Thanks!

Matt.

-----Original Message-----
From: PeterV [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2004 9:33 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: [facetedclassification] Introducing myself


Indeed. Every month or three I ask the newbies to introduce themselves.
So everyone who hasn't done so yet and feels like it, please introduce
yourself and describe your interest in faceted classification. Thank
you. It helps if we know each other :)
Peter

>  Browsing through the archive, it seems to be the custom to introduce 
>  oneself



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