Informative Faceted Searching (IFS)

Faceted Search

The Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval provides the following instructive description of Faceted Search from a workshop [http://facetedsearch.googlepages.com] in 2006:

The web search world, since its very beginning, has offered two paradigms:

• Navigational search uses a hierarchy structure (taxonomy) to enable users to browse the information space by iteratively narrowing the scope of their quest in a predetermined order, as exemplified by Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ, etc.
• Direct search allows users to simply write their queries as a bag of words in a text box. This approach has been made enormously popular by Web search engines, such as Google and Yahoo! Search.

Over the last few years, the direct search paradigm has gained dominance and the navigational approach became less and less popular. Recently a new approach has emerged, combining both paradigms, namely the faceted search approach. Faceted search enables users to navigate a multi-dimensional information space by combining text search with a progressive narrowing of choices in each dimension. It has become the prevailing user interaction mechanism in e-commerce sites and is being extended to deal with semi-structured data, continuous dimensions, and folksonomies.

Informative Faceted Searching (IFS)

Extending search capabilities following Faceted classification.Search results would include navigational paths to1. Classifications that are specified2. Children, grandchildren, etc., classifications of classifications specified3. Additional classifications that were found in the search results that were not specified4. Additional children, grandchildren, etc., classifications that were found in additional classifications

By providing numbered items 3 and 4, the search capability would provide navigational paths outside of what was being searched, thus making the search results more informative to the related classifications of the search results and not just those that were declared in the search criteria.

Example:(Will provide at a later time)2007-01-04