Week Twelve | Part Two

Faceted Classifications

Faceted classifications are increasingly common on the World Wide Web. This is not surprising — facets are a natural way of organizing content to accommodate the needs of the site visitor.

Facets work well when there are three or more dimensions to the content being classified because each item of information is discreetly connected to a) the thing that has this property and b) other things with similar properties.

Anything can be accurately grouped based on any number of criteria. Take beer, for example.

Beer can be categorized by: type (pilsner, ale, stout), country of origin (Germany, England, Ireland), taste (hoppy, complex, robust), color (pale, amber, dark), brewer (Dortmunder, Green King, Guinness) price, brewing season, and so on.

If you consider the thousands of brands of beer available ... and all of them with data that fit into the categories I've described ... you can imagine how daunting it would be to provide this information to a potential customer either online or in a store.

Two Types of Faceted Classifications

First, let's look at the Colon Classification, named after S.R. Ranganathan's Colon. Of the two, it is the simplist. This system has five facets:

• Personality (The thing in question.)
• Matter (What something is made of.)
• Energy (How something changes, is processed, or evolves.)
• Space (Where something is.)
• Time (When something happens.)

Returning to our beer example, we could start to itemize the properties of each product using the Colon PMEST Classification:

Hmmm ... looks like the start of a database, doesn't it?

The Bliss Bibliographic Classification offers thirteen facets that can be renamed, removed, or adapted to suit your particular needs:

Facets > Databases > Search Engines > eCommerce

Facet classifications provide a natural, fluid framework to organize information for database creation. They also provide the keywords and phrase necessary to incorporate metadata into Web pages.

Since both databases and metadata are searchable items, is it any wonder that the facet classifications are the preferred method to retrieve information on the Web? Yet surprisingly few Web sites use facet classification as the starting point for their information architecture.

Instead, they rely on traditional taxonomy because it is a system that closely resembles actual organizational structure. This is the framework most clients are familiar with, and, right or wrong, they assume this is the information method most beneficial to their customers.

Please go to Week Twelve Part 3 ».