Facets and Faceted NavigationDevelopment

Tom ReamyChief Knowledge Architect

KAPS Group

Knowledge Architecture Professional Services

http://www.kapsgroup.com

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Agenda

Two Case Studies– Good and Bad

Development Process– Research Foundation

– Facet Design: Sources– Integrated Solution

• Metadata Strategy – Technology and People

– Develop, Test, Monitor, Refine Application Conclusions

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Enterprise Environment – Case Studies

A Tale of Two Taxonomies – It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

Basic Approach– Initial meetings – project planning– High level K map – content, people, technology– Contextual and Information Interviews– Content Analysis– Draft Taxonomy – validation interviews, refine– Integration and Governance Plans

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Enterprise Environment – Case One – Taxonomy, 7 facets

Taxonomy of Subjects / Disciplines:– Science > Marine Science > Marine microbiology > Marine toxins

Facets:– Organization > Division > Group– Clients > Federal > EPA– Instruments > Environmental Testing > Ocean Analysis > Vehicle– Facilities > Division > Location > Building X– Methods > Social > Population Study– Materials > Compounds > Chemicals– Content Type – Knowledge Asset > Proposals

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Enterprise Environment – Case One – Taxonomy, 7 facets

Project Owner – KM department – included RM, business process

Involvement of library - critical Realistic budget, flexible project plan Successful interviews – build on context

– Overall information strategy – where taxonomy fits Good Draft taxonomy and extended refinement

– Software, process, team – train library staff– Good selection and number of facets

Final plans and hand off to client

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Enterprise Environment – Case Two – Taxonomy, 4 facets

Taxonomy of Subjects / Disciplines:– Geology > Petrology

Facets:– Organization > Division > Group– Process > Drill a Well > File Test Plan– Assets > Platforms > Platform A– Content Type > Communication > Presentations

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Enterprise Environment – Case Two – Taxonomy, 4 facets

Environment Issues– Value of taxonomy understood, but not the complexity

and scope– Under budget, under staffed– Location – not KM – tied to RM and software

• Solution looking for the right problem

– Importance of an internal library staff– Difficulty of merging internal expertise and taxonomy

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Enterprise Environment – Case Two – Taxonomy, 4 facets

Project Issues– Project mind set – not infrastructure– Wrong kind of project management

• Special needs of a taxonomy project• Importance of integration – with team, company

– Project plan more important than results• Rushing to meet deadlines doesn’t work with semantics as

well as software

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Enterprise Environment – Case Two – Taxonomy, 4 facets

Research Issues– Not enough research – and wrong people– Interference of non-taxonomy – communication– Misunderstanding of research – wanted tinker toy connections

• Interview 1 implies conclusion A

Design Issues– Not enough facets– Wrong set of facets – business not information– Ill-defined facets – too complex internal structure

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Taxonomy DevelopmentConclusion: Risk Factors

Political-Cultural-Semantic Environment – Not simple resistance - more subtle

• – re-interpretation of specific conclusions and sequence of conclusions / Relative importance of specific recommendations

Understanding project scope Access to content and people

– Enthusiastic access

Importance of a unified project team– Working communication as well as weekly meetings

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Faceted Navigation: Development processOverview

Research Foundation – KA Audit– Environment – Technology and People– Users, Content, Information Behaviors and Needs

Facet Design - Sources– Selection of Facets and Facet Structure

Integrated solution– Metadata Strategy – Technology and People

Application – Design, Develop, Test, Refine– Monitor and Refine

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Faceted Navigation: Development processInformation / Knowledge Environment

Strategic Foundation– Info Problems – what, how severe– Political environment – support, special interests

Strategic Questions – why, what value from the taxonomy and facet classification, how are you going to use it

Technology Environment – ECM, Enterprise Search High Level Content Map / Content Structures High Level Community Map – formal and informal

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Faceted Navigation: Development processFacet Design - Sources

Facet Theory and Practice– Broaden your perspective

Domain Collection - metadata– Database or Catalog– Unstructured content – Much more difficult

Content Structure – vocabularies, glossaries, etc. Building Facets – facetize the taxonomy

– Pull out facets – • Chemistry – Agents/Compounds, Instruments• Chemistry and Health -- methods

Current or projected metadata as source– Content Types – presentations, well reports, policy

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Faceted Navigation: Development processResearch Foundation

Users – formal and informal communities– How do users think, categorize

– Information behaviors and needs– Natural Level categories

What labels do they use? – Assets vs. Facilities and instruments / Processes vs Activities– Issue – labels that people use to describe their business and label

that they use to find information

Suitability of Facets and Facet Labels– Support for user tasks

Interviews, surveys, search log analysis, folksonomies

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Faceted Navigation: Development process An Integrated Approach: Elements Multiple Knowledge Structures

– Facet – orthogonal dimension of metadata– Taxonomy - Subject matter / aboutness

Technology – Search, Content Management Text analytics

– Entity extraction – feeds facets, signatures, ontologies– Taxonomy & Auto-categorization – aboutness, subject

People – tagging, evaluating tags, fine tune rules and taxonomy

People – Users, social tagging, suggestions

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Faceted Navigation: Development process Integrated Solutions: Technology Search – Integrated features, facets and clusters and tag

clouds and feedback Enterprise Content Management – tagging and Policy

– Place to add metadata, supported by policy– Gather input from authors, tag clouds plus

Text Analytics – Taxonomy management, entity extraction, categorization, sentiment

– Auto-populate variety of metadata – author, title, date, etc.– Relevance – best bets to weights and classes of documents

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Faceted Navigation: Development process Software Tools – Auto-categorization Auto-categorization

– Training sets – Bayesian, Vector Machine– Terms – literal strings, stemming, dictionary of related terms– Rules – simple – position in text (Title, body, url)– Advanced – saved search queries (full search syntax)– NEAR, SENTENCE, PARAGRAPH– Boolean – X NEAR Y and Not-Z

Advanced Features– Facts / ontologies /Semantic Web – RDF +– Sentiment Analysis – positive, negative, neutral

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Faceted Navigation: Development process Software Tools – Entity Extraction Dictionaries – variety of entities, coverage, specialty

– Cost of update – service or in-house– Inxight – 50+ predefined entity types– Nstein – 800,000 people, 700,000 locations, 400,000 organizations

Rules– Capitalization, text – Mr., Inc.– Advanced – proximity and frequency of actions, associations– Need people to continually refine the rules

Entities and Categorization– Total number and pattern of entities = a type of aboutness of

the document – Bar Code, Fingerprint

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Faceted Navigation: Development process Integrated Solution: People Programmers, Librarians, Taxonomists, Metadata specialist

– Integrate, design, develop rules, monitor activity & quality

Authors, Subject Matter Experts– Input into design (important facets), rules, activity meaning

Users – Web 2.0– Feedback – quality and usability– Suggestions – missing terms, bad categorization & entity– Tags Clouds & folksonomy – for social networking features,

not for information retrieval

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Faceted Navigation: Development process Faceted Navigation Application Usability Studies

– Integration with browse/search - Findability– Equal ranked facets or primary-secondary facets– Granularity of Facets– Ordering of the facets– Sorting within facets

Monitor usage and refine.– Unused facets / Preferred facets / facet combinations– Map to user communities / information behaviors

Refine auto-categorization and entity values– Disambiguation

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Conclusion - Development

Design starts with self-knowledge – users, content, activities Integrated Solution is needed

– Multiple Knowledge structures, technology, people– Search, Content management, text analytics

Faceted navigation requires a lot of Metadata Text Analytics (Entity extraction and auto-categorization) are

essential Monitor and Refine never ends – dedicated resources Semantic Projects are different

– Project management, software evaluation

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Conclusions – Faceted Navigation

The future is the combination of simple facets (name catalogs of entities) with rich taxonomies with complex semantics / ontologies

– Ontologies = Relationships of two facets

Facets call for a new type of taxonomies– Faceted taxonomies and/or simple taxonomies

Future – new kinds of applications:– Text Mining, research tools, sentiment

Future of Search – smart ways to refine results, not better relevance

– Real problem with 10 mil hits – no way to get to target– Include facets, taxonomies, semantics, & lots of metadata

Questions?

Tom Reamytomr@kapsgroup.com

KAPS Group

Knowledge Architecture Professional Services

http://www.kapsgroup.com

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Faceted Navigation Resources

Articles– Faceted Classification Resource Collection

• http://deyalexander.com/resources/faceted-classification.html

– A Simplified Model for Facet Analysis• http://iainstitute.org/pg/

a_simplified_model_for_facet_analysis.php

– Mailing List for Faceted Classification• http://www.poorbuthappy.com/fcd/

– Study – Facets on the Web (75 ecommerce sites)• http://mypage.iu.edu/%7Eklabarre/facetstudy.html

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Faceted Navigation Resources

Example Implementations– Berkeley SIMS – Flamenco

http://bailando.sims.berkeley.edu/flamenco.html– Facetmap – demo’s – www.facetmap.com

Tools– Business Objects / Inxight – entity and fact extraction –

www.inxight.com– Teragram – www.teragram.com– Lexalytics – www.lexalytics.com– Data Harmony – www.dataharmony.com– Smart Logic – www.smartlogic.com

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Faceted Navigation Resources

Vendors– Most Search vendors now offer faceted navigation– FAST, Autonomy, etc.

• Beware of parametric search sold as facets

– Most focused on facets – application and metrics:• Endeca – http://www.endeca.com

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Faceted Navigation Resources

Articles– How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web

• http://www.misatonic.org/library/facet-web-howto.html– Putting Facets on the Web: An Annotated Bibliography

• http://www.miskatonic.org/library/facet-biblio.html

– Ecommerce – cooking and kitchen – Faceted Navigation http://www.

– Extended Faceted Taxonomies for Web Catalogs • http://www.ercim.org/publication/Ercim_News/enw51/tzitzikas.html

– Webdesignpractices – study of ecommerce use of faceted navigation – Use of Faceted Classification

• http://www.webdesignpractices.com/navigation/facets.html