Semantic Computing

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.