Three answers from ask@nownow.com to Joseph's question....
1.
From: NowNow [mailto:ask@nownow.com]
Sent: Saturday, November 04, 2006 11:45 AM Eastern Standard Time
To: Chun, Susan
Subject: RE: Is faceted indexing the future of social tagging?
AnsID:[YR4YWZZADZHZ3A0N9Y7Z-YR4YWZZADZHZ3A0N9Y7ZH9EZT450SKQCSDYDPBE0-A3H1VLC3HVWA34]
Your Request:Is faceted indexing the future of social tagging?
They are mutual, non-exclusive methods, that both have their distinguished
uses.
How Social Tagging Works
Folksonomies change the dynamics of generating useful index pages by
centralizing endless human perspectives of single or compound terms into
navigable indexes. It?s the equivalent of a dynamic, open-ended thesaurus,
eliminating the need to manage the static creation of valued relationships,
as co-occurance stitches together threads of information like newly created
and evolving synapses in the brain.
The usefulness of these visible, semantic relationships to the person
searching for specific content or products is quite possibly the most
sticky form of extended discovery not generated through database
algorithms.
Tagging creates community through the overlap of perspectives. While this
extends conversation, it also impacts sales potential of commerce sites by
adding another layer to collaborative filtering. Extend this concept
further into the realm of consumer contributions and it can provide big
business the incentive to open their gated approach of mass manufacturing,
allowing customers to participate in defining what a company produces by
simply tagging their objects.
Tagging builds community
Tagging increases the findability and attractiveness of content and
products
Tagging can give customers a transparent stake in the process of creating
services/products/content
The following page handles faceted indexing, or faceted classification in
great detail.
http://www.peterme.com/archives/00000063.html
Faceted classification assigns a set of parameters (facets) to the objects
[?]
The second thread involves faceted classification, one of the most
powerful, yet least understood, methods of organizing information. Most
folks, when thinking about organizing objects or information, immediately
think of a hierarchical, or taxonomic, organization; a top-down structure,
where you start with a number of broad categories that get ever more
detailed, until you arrive at the object. In such structures, each object
has a single home, and typically, one path to get there--this is how things
are organized in "the real world", where each item can only be in one
place. Oftentimes, when thinking of organizing information, a hierarchy is
where people begin (think Yahoo!).
Faceted classification, on the other hand, is a bottom-up scheme. Here,
each object is tagged with a certain set of attributes and values (these
are the facets), and the organization of these objects emerges from this
classification, and how a user chooses to access them. Toys, for example,
lend themselves to a faceted classification, with the facets being things
like, "Suitable Age," "Price," "Subject Type," "Brand," and even
"Character" (like Barbie or Elmo). Someone might be price conscious, and
want to start there; another knows that the child in question loves science
toys, and wants to begin with that. Faceted classification allows for
exploration directed by the user, where a large dataset is progressively
filtered through the user's various choices, until arriving at a manageable
set that meet the users' basic criteria. Instead of sifting through a
pre-determined hierarchy, the items are organized on-the-fly, based on
their inherent qualities.
Now, faceted classification isn't inherently innovative. In fact, objects
tend to have a fixed set of facets by which they are organized. Where
innovation comes is through user research that listens to how the
users/customers/audience think about and approach a task, and providing
tools to allow them to approach it meaningfully.
Wine is a much-fussed-over subject that, over the years, has developed a
language and organization of it's own, an organization that happens to be
faceted. Wines are typically organized by color, or varietal, or region,
and occasionally by price. Online wine merchants, like Wine.com (now
eVineyard), have exploited this, allowing their visitors to shop for wine
in these time-tested fashions.
2.
From: NowNow [mailto:ask@nownow.com]
Sent: Saturday, November 04, 2006 11:49 AM Eastern Standard Time
To: Chun, Susan
Subject: RE: Is faceted indexing the future of social tagging?
AnsID:[YR4YWZZADZHZ3A0N9Y7Z-YR4YWZZADZHZ3A0N9Y7ZDZXZ3TG25YPT6SY97AP0-A2RVSVYQETIVYR]
Your Request:Is faceted indexing the future of social tagging?
IT seems to have its uses, see details.
Using Faceted Classification in Indexing
Using faceted classification as an aid to indexing can produce better and
more consistent indexes. Leise (2001) noted that faceted classification
could help to analyze texts, capture all relevant items that should be
indexed, and ensure consistency when indexing the same kinds of things. An
indexer who is indexing a biography, may consider important facets such
as:
* Family
* Other relationships
* Training/Education
* Travels
* Places lived
* Career
* PublicationsAdvantages
In traditional library classification schemes such as DDC and LCC, each
document has a "correct" place in a hierarchically organized classification
system that makes use of cross-references.
A faceted classification system is different from traditional enumerative
systems. The former has the following characteristics:
* A faceted system focuses on the important and essential
characteristics of content objects, which is useful for fine-grained,
rapidly changing repositories
* Easy to add a new facet at any time
* Flexible in general
* Easier to construct the facet hierarchies.
Faceted classification is highly effective in the system of storage and
retrieval. Faceted analysis can be used to create deeper and more complex
knowledge structures by extending the range of categories and by exploring
variants of combination. The formulae developed for the combination of
terms and concepts will generate n-dimensional structures that seem
appropriate to a hypertext environment. Structures generated from the
expanded category base may be particularly useful in handling digital
objects (Broughton, 2002).
Source:
3.
From: NowNow [mailto:ask@nownow.com]
Sent: Saturday, November 04, 2006 12:36 PM Eastern Standard Time
To: Chun, Susan
Subject: RE: Is faceted indexing the future of social tagging?
AnsID:[YR4YWZZADZHZ3A0N9Y7Z-YR4YWZZADZHZ3A0N9Y7ZXJ2ZWCY3VKMMJSZG42TZ-A1BZEM3JGQGZJ3]
Your Request:Is faceted indexing the future of social tagging?
On Social Tagging
As social tagging begins to catch on beyond the early adopters, content and
commerce domains are opening up their information architectures to empower
their consumers to tag, creating exponentially greater degrees of faceted,
semantic relationships between their information objects.
Amazon is already in the lead to extend this open paradigm into the
commerce space with object tagging and Mechanical Turk (a program which
could seriously disrupt peasant-class wage pay around the world). Amazon?s
past innovation isn?t a guarantee for future success, but their recent
moves prove to be a good sign.
How Social Tagging Works
Folksonomies change the dynamics of generating useful index pages by
centralizing endless human perspectives of single or compound terms into
navigable indexes. It?s the equivalent of a dynamic, open-ended thesaurus,
eliminating the need to manage the static creation of valued relationships,
as co-occurance stitches together threads of information like newly created
and evolving synapses in the brain.
The usefulness of these visible, semantic relationships to the person
searching for specific content or products is quite possibly the most
sticky form of extended discovery not generated through database
algorithms.
I mean, forget dropping out of my mental model to browse topical,
categorized navigation or searching for an explicit term or phrase; when I
engage with a domain such as flickr or del.icio.us, my desire to stay
within the domain is increased simply because the language I use to define
my world (tagging) simultaneously allows me to peer into the world of
like-minded folk (ergo: folksonomies).
Flickr tags display global (community) or mine
Tagging creates community through the overlap of perspectives. While this
extends conversation, it also impacts sales potential of commerce sites by
adding another layer to collaborative filtering. Extend this concept
further into the realm of consumer contributions and it can provide big
business the incentive to open their gated approach of mass manufacturing,
allowing customers to participate in defining what a company produces by
simply tagging their objects.
* Tagging builds community
* Tagging increases the findability and attractiveness of content and
products
* Tagging can give customers a transparent stake in the process of
creating services/products/content
Back To The Interface
Try thinking about tagging interfaces on a few distinct levels:
* Interfaces which display common tags from across a particular domain
need to be designed to maximize their semantic relationships.
* Object-level interfaces need to be re-crafted to both accommodate the
display of previously applied personal tags and tags applied by the
community.
* Management screens, which can give ownership of personally applied
tags to the people that spend their time generating them, need to be
compiled from contributing domains across the web for individuals to manage
and, potentially, collect residual dividends related to sales generated
from exposed tags.
I recently stumbled across an interesting site that leverages the API of
del.icio.us tags. Kevan Davis created extisp.icio.us to scrape user tags
and visually represent them using only words or images:
Verbal visualization
My good friend, DeWitt Clinton, created Delancy, which leverages the open
nature of del.icio.us, providing an enhancement with the ability to manage
tagged objects by personal click-through popularity:
Delancy
Kevan?s enhancement focuses on re-presenting information in a way that
presents our constantly evolving association with the world outside, while
DeWitt?s enhancement focuses on adding feature value, assisting us to
quickly find our most used bookmarks.
This type of innovative, open source development reflects the same type of
creative energy that non-developers posses ? people that are becoming
hooked on tagging, hooked on participation.
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