Re: Re: Defining basic vocabulary of faceted classification (TERMINOLOGY)

At 08:38 AM 1/5/2003 -0800, you wrote:
>At 12:35 AM 1/5/2003 +0000, you wrote:
> >Many facets don't have anything to do
> >with the subject matter (e.g. date, author, color, popularity, etc.).
>
>Just curious here. Are not object such as date, author, etc, attributes of
>the subject matter?

I guess it depends on your definitions -- they're certainly attributes of 
the resource's content, yes. But a subject usually reflects what an article 
is about. Remember that libraries index books by title, author ... *and* 
subject.

For example, the number one book on Amazon right now is "8 Minutes in the 
Morning". The Subject of that book is "fitness" or "losing weight". That's 
an important facet. But there are other values in other facets, like Price 
($10.47), rating (4.5 stars), edition (hardcover only), and so on. These 
are attributes of the book itself, but not of the book's subject. They are 
other headings under which you could file "8 Minutes in the Morning".

A better example would be a piece of furniture, like a chair at a chair 
store. It has facets, certainly, like size, softness, price, and whether it 
has a refrigerator in its arm. But what's the subject matter of the chair? 
At this point, it seems awkward to classify the chair with things called 
"subjects".

That's kinda what I was getting at. I think a lot of people will use 
"subject" or its synonyms as the name of a facet, and we might not want to 
reserve it to mean "one possible value in any facet".

trav

Travis Wilson
Development
http://facetmap.com


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