Faceted search augments lexical search with a faceted navigation system, allowing users to narrow results by applying filters based on a

faceted classification A faceted classification is a classification scheme used in organizing knowledge into a systematic order. A faceted classification uses semantic categories, either general or subject-specific, that are combined to create the full classification ...

of the items. It is a

parametric search In the design and analysis of algorithms for combinatorial optimization, parametric search is a technique invented by for transforming a decision algorithm (does this optimization problem have a solution with quality better than some given thres ...

technique. A faceted classification system classifies each information element along multiple explicit dimensions, facets, enabling the classifications to be accessed and ordered in multiple ways rather than in a single, predetermined,

taxonomic 280px, Generalized scheme of taxonomy Taxonomy is a practice and science concerned with classification or categorization. Typically, there are two parts to it: the development of an underlying scheme of classes (a taxonomy) and the allocation ...

order. Facets correspond to properties of the information elements. They are often derived by analysis of the text of an item using

entity extraction Named-entity recognition (NER) (also known as (named) entity identification, entity chunking, and entity extraction) is a subtask of information extraction that seeks to locate and classify named entities mentioned in unstructured text into pr ...

techniques or from pre-existing fields in a database such as author, descriptor, language, and format. Thus, existing web-pages, product descriptions or online collections of articles can be augmented with navigational facets. Faceted search interfaces were first developed in the academic world by

Ben Shneiderman Ben Shneiderman (born August 21, 1947) is an American computer scientist, a Distinguished University Professor in the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science, which is part of the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathem ...

, Steven Pollitt,

Marti Hearst Marti Alice Hearst is a professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. She did early work in corpus-based computational linguistics, including some of the first work in automating sentiment analysis, and word s ...

, and

Gary Marchionini Gary Marchionini is an American information scientist and educator at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1998–present). Early life and education Marchionini received a PhD in 1981 from Wayne State University in the subject of "Cu ...

in the 1990s and 2000s. The most well-known of these efforts was the Flamenco research project at

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

led by Marti Hearst. Concurrently, there was development of commercial faceted search systems, notably

Endeca Endeca was a software company headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that sold eCommerce search, customer experience management, enterprise search and business intelligence applications. Endeca was founded in 1999 as Optigrab. It was a priv ...

and

Spotfire TIBCO Spotfire is an artificial intelligence (AI)-based analytics platform. Before being acquired by TIBCO in 2007, Spotfire was a business intelligence company based in Somerville, Massachusetts. History Spotfire was co-founded by Christophe ...

. Within the academic community, faceted search has attracted interest primarily among

library and information science Library and information science (LIS)Library and Information Sciences is the name used in the Dewey Decimal Classification for class 20 from the 18th edition (1971) to the 22nd edition (2003). are two interconnected disciplines that deal with inf ...

researchers, and to some extent among

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

researchers specializing in

information retrieval Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an Information needs, information need. The information need can be specified in the form ...

Mass market use

Faceted search has become a popular technique in commercial search applications, particularly for online retailers and libraries. An increasing number of enterprise search vendors provide software for implementing faceted search applications. Online retail catalogs pioneered the earliest applications of faceted search, reflecting both the faceted nature of product data (most products have a type, brand, price, etc.) and the ready availability of the data in retailers' existing information-systems. In the early 2000s retailers started using faceted search, in part due to published studies that evaluated user search experience on popular sites. , among the 50 largest US-based online retailers, 40% had implemented faceted search.Smashing Magazine: The Current State of E-Commerce Search
Retrieved on 2014-08-27. Examples include the filtering options that appear in the left column on

amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc., doing business as Amazon, is an American multinational technology company engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos in Bellevu ...

Google Shopping Google Shopping, formerly Google Product Search, Google Products and Froogle, is a Google service created by Craig Nevill-Manning which allows users to search for products on online shopping websites and compare prices between different vendor ...

after a keyword search has been performed.

Libraries and information science

In 1933, the noted librarian Ranganathan proposed a

system for library materials, known as colon classification. In the pre-computer era, he did not succeed in replacing the pre-coordinated

Dewey Decimal Classification The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) (pronounced ) colloquially known as the Dewey Decimal System, is a proprietary library classification system which allows new books to be added to a library in their appropriate location based on subject. ...

system. Modern online library catalogs, also known as

online public access catalog The online public access catalog (OPAC), now frequently synonymous with ''library catalog'', is an online database of materials held by a library or group of libraries. Online catalogs have largely replaced the analog card catalogs previously ...

s (OPAC), have increasingly adopted faceted search interfaces. Noted examples include the

North Carolina State University North Carolina State University (NC State, North Carolina State, NC State University, or NCSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Raleigh, North Carolina, United States. Founded in 1887 and p ...

library catalog (part of the Triangle Research Libraries Network) and the

OCLC OCLC, Inc. See also: is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large". It was founded in 1967 as the ...

Open

WorldCat WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries), in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the O ...

system. The

CiteSeerX CiteSeerX (formerly called CiteSeer) is a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers, primarily in the fields of computer and information science. CiteSeer's goal is to improve the dissemination and access of a ...

projectCiteSeerX
Citeseerx.ist.psu.edu. Retrieved on 2013-07-21. at the

Pennsylvania State University The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU) is a Public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related Land-grant university, land-grant research university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsyl ...

allows faceted search for academic documents and continues to expand into other facets such as table search.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Faceted Search Information retrieval techniques Information retrieval genres