Faceted Classification and Data Warehouses, etc.

The more I look into this approach to managing content and data on 
web sites, the more I am reminded of a method I used to employ for 
reporting financial information.

To build comprehensive views of financial activity - on both sides of 
the ledger - we used to take categories of expenses, for example, and 
find ways of creating 'drill down' views. For an academic institution 
we would start with a campus location, then embed expense categories, 
program, year of study, student status, etc. so deans and 
administrators could look at different variables (facets?) of the 
total expenditures for any of the active campuses.

It occurs to me now that the problems we had doing that successfully 
involved a lack of orthogonality (as I understand it) in the 
categories. If we chose overlapping (non-orthogonal) categories, the 
expense amount would repeat in two different places, throwing the 
total in our reports out of balance with the general ledger total. 

One of the prerequisites for doing the reports was that each account 
had to have all of the properties used in the drill down, otherwise 
we would get a similar situation: the totals wouldn't balance. 

Does anyone else have a similar experience, or care to comment on 
this observation?








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