How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web: "How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web
Denton, William. 'How to Make a Faceted Classification and Put It On the Web' Nov. 2003. http://www.miskatonic.org/library/facet-web-howto.html.
This follows Putting Facets on the Web: An Annotated Bibliography, and is the second paper I wrote for Prof. Clare Beghtol of the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto, who led me in a reading course named 'Applying Faceted Classification in an Online World.' (It's also available as a PDF (215K) which is formatted for printing.)
0. Introduction
Faceted classifications are increasingly common on the World Wide Web, especially on commercial web sites (Adkisson 2003). This is not surprising--facets are a natural way of organizing things. Many web designers have probably rediscovered them independently by asking, 'What other ways would people want to view this data? What's another way to slice it?' A survey of the literature on applying facets on the web (Denton 2003) shows that librarians think it a good idea but are unsure how to do it, while the web people who are already doing it are often unaware of S.R. Ranganathan, the Classification Research Group, and the decades of history behind facets. "