Using facets and tags together for navigation

December 14, 2005 10:55 AM

Do you know any good examples of sites that use both facets and tags for navigation?

I've seen plenty that use categories and facets - lots of shopping sites have several levels of categories (hierarchy) and then go to facets. And other sites - AskMe included - combine one level of categories with tags. But combining facets and tags seems to be rarer. I looked at facetious, but was put off when I browsed to Place: SF and saw that over half the links were about science fiction. But maybe that's just a problem with this one implementation?

This is for an intranet where findability is key and ease of adding/tagging content is only slightly less key.

posted by expialidocious to computers & internet (2 comments total)

Tags and taxonomies are a bit antithetical to each other and most folks in a position to implement one or the other have a philosophical stake in one or the other. As a result, there are not (yet) many implementations of a dual system like you describe. I know that Microsoft has done some hybrid tagging/indexing on their internal site, but they haven't published too much about it.

If you'd like an overview of taxonomies in an IA/KM context, I'd look for:

Gilchrist, A. and Kibby, P. (2000) Taxonomies for Business: Access and Connectivity in a Wired World. London: TFPL

It's the best of a pretty lame lot of overviews I've found.

A colleague of mine has, I think, just presented a system to allow users to tag records in on online library catalog (OPAC). I can try and track it down if this sounds helpful.

If you email me, I might be able to point you to some resources that are not acceptable for posting on Ask.Me, mostly scholarly papers.

You might also have more luck doing literature searches, if you're going that route, using the terms "thesauri," "taxonomies," or "controlled vocabularies" as I think that's what you're asking about.
posted by stet at 5:36 PM on December 14, 2005

Thanks for your response. I keep thinking someone must have solved this issue before me, but good examples are not easily found.

I'm not sure if I defined my question well enough, but the base problem is this: I have site with lots of documents that would *almost* fit perfectly in a faceted or hierarchical system - the commonality being the mutually exclusive aspects of the categories and facet values. It's an intranet mainly used by desktop support technicians. So most documents apply to, say, a particular operating system, but some apply to more than one and for some the OS is not relevant. Likewise for client vs. server - some are easy to determine, some are both, some are neither. That's why I'm interested in a hybrid system, and I think facets would work better than a hierarchical taxonomy because of the way the attributes intersect.
posted by expialidocious at 3:56 PM on December 16, 2005