[topicmapmail] Are Facets Really Simple After All?

[Kal Ahmed]

Carlo,

Take a look at [1]. I think it does everything you propose. Plus the
PSIs are directly supported by TMBrowse (part of the TM4Web/Velocity
application).

Cheers,

Kal

[1]
http://www.topicmapcentral.com/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=FacetedClassificationPattern

On Sun, 2003-11-30 at 20:06, Carlo Moneti wrote:
> On 2003.11.30 11:25 Thomas B. Passin wrote:
> 
> > If this is a reasonable way to look at facets, then I do not see why 
> > using facets would be different in any essential way from classifying 
> > using a single hierarchy.  A given topic could be related to one of the 
> > faceted terms, say "location", by an association called, perhaps, 
> > "hasFacet".  You would find out which particular facet tree that 
> > "location" is in by walking up to the root of its tree to arrive at 
> > "Geography", whose type would be "Facet".  Of course, a real 
> > implementation would use some kind of shortcut to avoid actually walking 
> > the tree each time.
> > 
> > Is there something I am missing here, or is it really this simple?
> 
> I have come to the same conclusion as Thomas. Just last night I resolved 
> the following topic and association types:
> 
> topic type to define a facet (#facet-root)
> topic type to define a facet category (#facet-category)
> association type for parent/child relation of facet-categories 
> (#facet-parent-child)
> association type for topic as member of a facet-category (#facet-member)
> 
> This goes a long way in addressing my concern (perhaps needless) about 
> polluting topic info with facet info, which seems to me like application 
> infrastructure detail rather than true topic info. True topics won't be 
> polluted in their occurrence data (as Murray also worried); and facet  
> hierarchies, being differentiated from others, can be processed distinctly 
> (turned on or off, as Murray pointed out). Also, many facet hierarchies may 
> be generic enough to have a double use as non facet-related hierarchies.
> 
> This approach is convenient in that it addressess easily and intuitively (I 
> think) the mapping of facet info from XTM to a relational database that 
> some application will query to generate a faceted navigation experience. 
> Now, perhaps this isn't ambitious enough. Perhaps there is in theory a way 
> to inform a topic map and topic map engine of an equivalent of the 
> aforementioned application logic and db queries, so that the topic map 
> engine can generate a faceted navigation experience. This, however, is 
> beyond my knowledge. Is anyone working on this, or theorizing such 
> potential?
> 
> Cheers,
> Carlo Moneti
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-- 
Kal Ahmed <kal@techquila.com>
techquila