When doing research for my thesis, I’ve found that there’s an incredible amount of terms being used to describe the user interface paradigm known variously as faceted browsing, view-based search or several other names.
Some of the better known applications using this paradigm (or user interface design pattern, if you prefer) are Flamenco, Epicurious, Wine.com, and of course MuseumFinland which was made in our group.
Here’s a list of the terms I found, together with comments, just in case someone finds it useful.
I’ve ordered the terms based on the number of hits they give on Google, most popular first.
This should give an idea of the relative popularity of each.
Faceted search (165000 hits)
Somewhat misleading, since searching brings in mind text search. Nevertheless this seems to be an accepted general term for the paradigm.
Guided navigation (133000 hits)
A product by , often used to refer to the paradigm it implements. Also used, somewhat surprisingly, in the 3rd edition of the Polar Bear book (I would have preferred a more vendor-neutral term). The number of Google hits is surprisingly large. It is possible that the term (or just the two adjacent words) is used in some other context, although most hits I checked did seem to refer to Endeca or the paradigm.
Faceted browsing (81300 hits)
Used by the SIMILE project (e.g. Longwell, Exhibit). Also appears in Wikipedia in the form Faceted browser. I like the implication that this is just a special kind of browsing.
Faceted navigation (44800 hits)
Used in Welie’s design pattern collection and a spot is reserved in the Yahoo! design pattern collection as well, although the description is not yet there.
Faceted metadata (24500 hits)
Used by the Flamenco project. The problem with this term is that in some cases, the original metadata is not faceted and has to be restructured into facets first. Of course, what you get then is even more metadata. This term also doesn’t sound like a user interface thingie, it sounds like low-level technical stuff.
Dynamic taxonomies (800 hits)
Used by Giovanni M. Sacco in his papers, not many others.
Relational navigation (768 hits)
A term for their Seamark product. As far as I can tell this is just the same paradigm with a new name, but maybe they’ve added something to it.
View-based search (490 hits)
This was used by the HIBROWSE project, one of the first (if not the first?) user interfaces based on this paradigm. However, nowadays the term is only used by our research group. I think the term has something to do with the HIBROWSE interface having lots of small windows or views to the data, but no separate list of search results that would stand out – thus, all you had to work with were the views. More recent systems generally dedicate only a small amount of space to the facets/views and lots of space for the results.
Multi-facet search (327 hits)
Yet another name, used in some papers from our research group.
I am not aware of any significant differences in the meaning of these terms. AFAICT any application where one of the terms is appropriate could be described using any other. There are obviously some differences in emphasis of different aspects but the core meaning seems to be the same.
My personal recommendation would be to consider using either faceted browsing, faceted navigation or faceted search, in that order, when referring to the paradigm. The other terms are problematic, marginal and/or vendor-specific. Also, in all of these recommended terms, the connection to faceted classification (used in the library sciences) is fairly obvious.
Edit Aug 29: Added “multi-facet search”, which I forgot from the first round.
You should add Drilldown. Faceted browsing is an application of this Data Warehousing technique from Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) to more general data on the web and with a nicer interface. The connection of faceted browsing to faceted classification is only in the interface and usage but the creation and management is more connected to OLAP. By the way all faceted browsing demos on the web (including MuseumFinland) are tiny games because of its limited size. Do you know of any serious applications with Millions of items?
Lately, when being specific, I’ve been using the long term view-based query constraining and visualization.
The reasons for this are:
First, I like view-based better than faceted because I want to see the paradigm as large as possible, and I think the connotation to faceted classification is a constraint here. Sure, the interfaces o0f MuseumFinland, Flamenco etc. are strictly hierarchical facet, but is a map view of the items still a facet? what about a timeline? What about a semantic autocompletion box that matches concepts all over the different domains?
Second, I’ve expanded from search, browsing or the even more abstract navigation to what is actually done, i.e. query constraining and visualization. This is to underline the two basic functionalities inherent in the paradigm and to enable the analysis of these two as related to each other. So, in HIBROWSE, there were only views that did both, but in most current systems, there is a view visualization of the results meant only as a visualization – but it uses the same constructs and facets still, and could be used to constrain the search if we only wanted it to be so. I think there is fruitful dialogue to be had in how much particular views are focused on visualization vis-a-vis selection, and what is a good mix.
(and yes, this view of the paradigm comes much closer to the OLAP concept of Drilldown presented in the comment before – however, that too is a word not revealing its contents.)
Finally, to Jakob, I’m not aware of any live datasets online consisting of millions of items. However, internally we’ve stress-tested the MuseumFinland engine with the content of dmoz.org, and found that we could scale that engine up to two million items and 450 000 categories. Our new engine, based on creating efficient custom indexes in traditional relational databases should scale even better.
Thanks for the addition Jakob! I have to admit I’m not that familiar with the OLAP world, but I take your word that this is the same idea.
By now it’s pretty obvious that the same, or similar, idea has been reinvented many times in different CS fields and contexts with everyone coming up with their own terms. I wrote the above post from a lumper’s point of view (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters ), because I think that having dozens of terms for the “same” paradigm (in a broad sense) doesn’t exactly help finding relevant research and previous work.
Eetu’s suggestion of “view-based query constraining and visualization” may be general enough to cover all cases, but for the purpose of finding relevant information it doesn’t help much to coin a new term that nobody uses (currently zero hits for the phrase on Google). But if you want to avoid unwanted connotations like faceted classification, that may be a good approach.
BTW, Giovanni M. Sacco rejects “faceted search” in his recent papers for the same reason as Eetu, but he advocates “dynamic taxonomies” which seems to exclude maps, timelines etc. And the mSpace people got around the problem by calling their interface a mSpace.
I personally still think that the reference to faceted classification is not a bad thing to have, and that richer knowledge models, spatiotemporal data etc. can be incorporated as extensions of the facet model without having to invent new names. A splitter obviously wouldn’t agree…