[Web4lib] Faceted navigation as metasearch

[Genny.8215832 at bloglines.com]

Re KGS's question, yes, NCSU did say they were planning to apply faceted search
to more data sources.  They were at LITA Forum 2006 -- here's my LITAblog
entry about it:
http://litablog.org/2006/10/28/unbundling-the-ils-ncsu/

I had the opportunity to go to the KMWorld exhibits in San Jose this fall
and talk to some of the vendors like Endeca and Vivisimo about the issues
with pre-calculated facets vs. on-the-fly post-retrieval clustering.  I came
away thinking that a clustering approach would probably work better with a
federated search.  One of the things the folks from NCSU had mentioned was
the long time it takes to create the faceted index each day as new records
are added to their catalog.  So clustering seems more scalable, particularly
once you start talking about indexing a variable number of outside sources
over whose records you have no control.

As far as putting one of these
interfaces on top of a federated search, I understand the retrieval time problem
remains an issue when more than a handful of remote data sources are involved
(network latency alone, plus response time of each remote server).  

But
it sounded to me like the vendors are aware of these issues, and the search
vendors are talking to the database vendors.  I envision a scenario where
we can provide the illusion of federated search across multiple bibliographically-fielded
databases, while actually only having to query a single vendor-hosted service,
and presenting a faceted-style result.  

As Peter from MuseGlobal noted,
though, once you start bringing in all the unfielded data from places like
a general Google search, "faceted" means a whole other thing, more like running
some kind of semantic content extraction against a full-text corpus.  It would
result in a different set of terms than those in the controlled-vocabulary
fields of a journal database or OPAC.  I don't know if you could then combine
these results and "facets" together in a display that would not mislead the
user to some degree.

I'm sure somebody's workin' on it though ...

Genny
Engel
Internet Librarian
Sonoma County Library
gengel at sonoma.lib.ca.us

www.sonomalibrary.org