This morning, the discussion of faceted classifications on peterme caught my eye. This discussion led to a mention of Berkeley’s Flamenco project and a Digital Library Seminar on the project next Monday.
The abstract sounds interesting:
We have developed an innovative search interface that allows non-expert users to move through large information spaces in a flexible manner without feeling lost. The design goal was to offer users a “browsing the shelves” experience seamlessly integrated with focused search. Key to achieving our goal is the explicit exposure of hierarchical faceted metadata in a manner that is intuitive and inviting to users. After several iterations of design and testing, the usability results on an image collection are strikingly positive. We believe our approach marks a major step forward in search user interfaces and can serve as a model for web-based collections of up to 100,000 items.
Research done by:
Jennifer English, Marti Hearst, Rashmi Sinha, Kirsten Swearingen, Ping Yee
While obviously I won’t be making it to this seminar, the Flamenco site has links to pdfs and powerpoints of publications and talks that I’ll certainly need to look forward to when I get a chance to do some catch-up reading.
UCB looks like they have some interesting Digital Library stuff going on (http://elib.cs.berkeley.edu/). Martin, you might want to bring this up w/ Deb and the gang and see if they’re aware of what is being done or have been in contact.