Faceted Search

Abstract

The term facet means “little face” and is often used to describe one side of a many-sided object, especially a cut gemstone. In the context of information science, where the item being described is an information object, facets could refer to the object’s author, date, topic, etc. Facets are used to describe both the organization of information (faceted classification), and to interface techniques that provide flexible access to that information (faceted search). The motivation for faceted classification and search is that any single organizational structure is too limiting to accommodate access to complex domains. Multiple independent facets provide alternative ways of getting to the same information, thus supporting a wider range of end-user tasks and knowledge. The fields of faceted classification, information architecture, and data modeling provide theory and methods for identifying and organizing facets. The user interface challenge for faceted systems is in managing this added complexity, especially when working with very large and diverse information collections. Most interfaces to faceted information provide support for structured browsing (faceted navigation or browsing). In addition, some systems offer search capabilities and, more generally, tightly coupled views of the same information. This entry covers both the organization of information using facets, and the design of user interfaces to support searchers in accessing the information since the two aspects are closely related and should be considered together in designing information systems. The term facet is widely used in the information science community. In other disciplines attribute, dimension, metadata, property, or taxonomy are used to refer to similar concepts. Faceted search is used in this entry to refer to flexible access to faceted information, using both browsing and search. Other terms such as hierarchical faceted metadata, faceted search and browsing, and dynamic taxonomies refer to similar concepts.