Re: Survey on Faceted Browsers for RDF data ?

Hi all,

interesting discussion. For my working regarding FB, I distinguish three 
key aspects that are strongly related in the concept of FB:

1) The kind of (meta) data
The main principle is based on the principle of Faceted Classification 
[1]. I also like to refer to Yee et al [2] who built in my opinion the 
first FB.
- data is composed of orthogonal sets of categories
- data (or an individual facet value) may be flat (“by Pablo Picasso”) 
or hierarchical (“located in Vienna > Austria > Europe”)
- data (or an individual facet value) may be singlevalued or multi-valued.

Having the RDF data model as foundation, this definition will fit well.

2) Query
Queries against the (meta) data are not leading to a non-empty result sets.

Since the SPARQL queries could easily led to empty results, something 
like a pre-execution is required to avoid that. Thus, tools like Solr or 
Eleastic Search come in to play...

3) The UI
Faceted browsing is a suitable approach to assist end-users in searching 
within a mostly unknown data space. They always filter the collection by 
selecting only from existing characteristics of the remaining items. 
This is easier to handle than a free, textual query specification and it 
assures not to deliver an empty result set.
Since the paradigm is widely used in e-commerce application (amazon, 
ebay,...), also end-user know it well.


The rest are implementation specific details, that, in my opinion are 
good starting point to specify criteria for you investigation, e.g.,

- data access: single endpoint or multiple
- schema: are RDF schemas required or not
- data caching: direct access to endpoints or with an indexer
- facet representation
- result representation
...

Since I'm also interested in an end-user friendly solution to browse 
Linked Data sets, I'd like to support the investigation, if possible.

Cheers,
Martin


1: http://www.upriss.org.uk/papers/iccs00.pdf
2: http://flamenco.berkeley.edu/papers/flamenco-chi03.pdf

Am 27.04.2015 um 21:08 schrieb Kingsley Idehen:
> On 4/27/15 9:02 AM, Christian Morbidoni wrote:
>> Honestly I got a bit stuck asking myself "What exactly am I looking
>> for"? In other words: what is exactly a faceted browser for RDF data?
> Great point!
>
> All:
>
> What is "Faceted Browsing" ?
>
> What are the distinguishing characteristics (features, properties,
> attributes) of a Class of Thing referred to literally as a "Faceted
> Browser" ?
>
> If we cannot build a useful discussion thread based on this, what are we
> saying to both ourselves and the rest of the world re., the usefulness
> of the following:
>
> [1] RDF Language
>
> [2] Linked Open Data constructed using RDF Language.
>
> It's the year 2015, we can (and MUST) do better.
>
> Let's get some responses going, in the form of attributes and associated
> comments describing said attributes literally, at the very least.
>

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Received on Tuesday, 28 April 2015 07:32:36 UTC