Re: Survey on Faceted Browsers for RDF data ?

Hi Christian,

> ...
> 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.
> 
> Regarding the exploration, I think one should not only consider AND-ed facets (intersection) but also OR-ed facets (union). At a "faceted search" level, combining AND and OR is solved by Solr and other systems that allows you to ask for e.g. all books with author (A OR B) AND with language (it OR en).
> When it comes to "faceted browsers" (UI) this is more complicated as giving to much freedom would result in a complicated interaction, which is in contrast with the nature of a faceted browser (it should be simple to use). 
> In systems like Booking.com facets values are OR-ed  within the same facet category (e.g. star rating) and AND-ed among different categories. There is no way of AND-ing two facet values within the same facet category, and this makes perfectly sense as their facets are purely "orthogonal", but this is not always the case (see above).
> Do you know some systems addressing this?
Explorator allows that, and other set operations as well.
Cheers
D