Freshly back from a 3-day private session of our Proving Ground on Information Architecture and Taxonomy, hosted by the Library of Congress (the Federal Library and Information Center Committee or FLICC, specifically), and my mind is still reeling from all that was discussed, and all that we did not get a chance to cover.
For the last 2-3 years, I've typically thrown in a 30-45 minute section that I continuously update on some of my latest thinking around Folksonomies, Freeform tagging, and Facets. I mention quite a wide variety of systems during this section, and largely am looking to provide some food for the brain for the people who are attending, pointers to commercial systems, and when at all possible, pointers to free and/or opensource solutions - so it's possible to get some experience without committing to a full-fledged project.
Timing is everything, and recently on the (normally very silent) facetedclassification Yahoo! group, there was a posting about the Flamenco Project, an opensource project around faceted navigation and search, hosted by the UC Berkeley School of Information. I have not (yet) tried to install the project, but the tutorials and overview are very nice - and may further help cement both the benefits of faceted organization schemes, and also the WORK that is required to do this on any significant scale.
If anyone has used this system, I would love to hear more about how you are using it, if the payback you are seeing has been worth the effort, and if you have hit any scalability issues (or others) that have led you to alternative paths.
If you have experience with any other facet-based systems, whether commercial or not, I'd be interested in hearing more about your experiences as well. Having more examples to show on this front, and better ways to explain both the end result and the upfront and ongoing maintenance, would be much appreciated as I seek to continuously improve my presentation materials.
Feel free to call 781-268-0716 and leave me a message regarding this post. Any interesting comments I get I will post to the blog (unless you prefer not to get your 15 megabytes of fame). NOTE: There is a limit of 2 minutes per
recording, so you will need to be somewhat brief. Have your caffeine
fix in advance of the call ;).
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