I’m happy to learn about a very appealing workshop that will be host inside the SIGIR, the ACM annual Conference on Research & Development on Information Retrieval and Search, this summer in Seattle (August 6-11).

Faceted search is often considered an improved combination of the old navigational and search based paradigms, becoming a recurring interaction model in e-commerce sites and, with the explosion of semi-structured metadata and folksonomies, facets are again at the edge.

The workshop will be focused on Faceted Search and it will touch a lot of important and very hot topics:

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following areas:

* Facet creation from document meta-data and from document content through text analysis
* Facet creation from XML corpora and database records
*Facet creation by social tagging and folksonomies
* Efficient and scalable indexing and retrieval of faceted data
* APIs and frameworks for faceted search
* User interface issues in faceted search
* Faceted search in the mobile and pervasive domain
* Faceted search in e-commerce applications
* Faceted search and data mining, OLAP and Business Intelligence applications
* Emerging applications of faceted search
* Faceted search in the presence of imperfect, noisy data

The workshop will be made up by talks, papers and demos.

RawSugar will be there too, to present a live demo about their innovative approach of iteratively mixing hierarchical tagging and search to restrict the resultset.

While I appreciate the work Frank Smadja is doing with RawSugar, I don’t agree about considering this approach faceted based, because the higher level tags that they provide cannot be considered facets at all from a formal perspective (you can read more on this from Travis Wilson in The strict faceted classification model). Facets are not keywords but aspects (or dimensions in a n-space) that have to be exclusive but able to collectively cover and describe a domain of items. That’s why facets, cannot be created on the fly (like tags), but have to be carefully chosen studying the world of meaning that you aim to describe. The main benefit from this ‘rigourous’ approach is the improved findability for end-users (because for example values from different facets are disjoint).

Coming back to the workshop, it’s quite exciting to highlight how Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, IBM and Endeca people are organizing the event.

Update: the workshop program has been published on SIGIR’2006 Faceted Search Workshop Program. I would like to be there because I see a plenty of good papers. I hope that online papers will be published too for each one of the talks.

In the same category:

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