Of interest: Information Clustering / Faceted Categories Techniques and Search

["David RR Webber \(XML\)" <david@drrw.info>]

Clustering Versus Faceted Categories for Information Exploration
Marti A. Hearst, CACM

 

Information seekers often express a desire for a user interface that
organizes search results into meaningful groups, in order to help make
sense of the results, and to help decide what to do next. Currently,
two methods are quite popular: clustering and faceted categorization.
Here, I describe both approaches and summarize their advantages and
disadvantages based on the results of usability studies. Clustering
refers to the grouping of items according to some measure of similarity.
In document clustering, similarity is typically words and phrases.
Hierarchical Faceted Categories provides a set of meaningful labels
organized in such a way as to reflect the concepts relevant to a domain.
They are usually created manually, although assignment of documents to
categories can be automated to a certain degree of accuracy. The main
idea is quite simple. Rather than creating one large category hierarchy,
build a set of category hierarchies each of which corresponds to a
different facet (dimension or feature type) relevant to the
collection to be navigated.

http://bailando.sims.berkeley.edu/papers/cacm06.pdf