Synonyms
Dynamic taxonomies; Faceted browsing; Hierarchical faceted metadata
Definition
The term facetmeans “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...
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Dumais, S. (2018). Faceted Search. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_159
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_159
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