Re: Nested facets

Hi Peter -

You're right; like many interesting subjects, at first, it looks so 
obvious that it's not even worth discussing, but this is a deep and 
interesting topic.

At Endeca, when we started our basic research into facets for Guided 
Navigation, this came up quickly as a critical issue. Now, we 
manage "nested facets" with what we call "precedence rules" that 
give application owners editorial control over when a facet should 
appear. 

We pushed the bounds on this with one customer that has over 1500 
facets. While it was enough of a scaling challenge just to crunch 
results for 1500 facets, there was also an equal scaling challenge 
from an information science/usability perspective to present all of 
this information to the user in a meaningful way. Logically, all 
1500 facets were meaningful from the root node, but pragmatically, 
some were subordinate to others, while others (like manufacturer, 
price, availability, or material) might always be important.

It turns out that there are lots of ways to handle these. For 
different use cases, it might be desirable to fire precedence rules 
from the root, leaf, or intermediate nodes of a facet. Given a large 
number or rules, sometimes it might make sense to be less explicit 
about these, but rather to control programmatically when facets 
appear according to their "information content" relative to the 
current results, or by assigning an editorial "weight" to each 
facet. Again, lots of right ways to do this, and lots of use cases 
out there that exercise them all.

Pete Bell
Endeca


--- In [email protected], "PeterV" <peter@p...> 
wrote:
> I wrote about the concept of "nested facets" here:
> http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/002793.html
> 
> It's a very simple concept, but one that I think we should be 
aware of
> (it isn't represented in XFML nor in Facetmap (afaik)), so that we 
can
> make sure that it makes it into our tools.
> 
> I'm looking to see if this concept of nested facets has been
> described/discussed elsewhere (in the LIS community?), probably 
using
> other terms...
> 
> I'd like to spread knowledge about it, but I want to use a 
terminology
> that already exists, if any.
> 
> Thanks for any pointers!
> Cheers,
> Peter



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