I would like to make you aware of the work­shop of inter­est for any­body into faceted search and related topics:

FIND ’08: 2nd inter­na­tional work­shop on Dynamic Tax­onomies and Faceted Search

Torino, Italy, Sep­tem­ber 1–5, 2008 (in con­junc­tion with DEXA 2008)

Impor­tant Dates:

Sub­mis­sion of papers: 15 March 2008 Noti­fi­ca­tion of accep­tance: 20 April 2008 Camera-ready copies: 15 May 2008

http://www.sig-find.org/find08/index.html

Work­shop description

Cur­rent search par­a­digms for the web, direct access via search engines and nav­i­ga­tional access via sta­tic tax­onomies, have recently been strongly crit­i­cized. A third approach, dynamic tax­onomies or faceted­search, focuses on user-centered con­cep­tual explo­ration and is finally gain­ing accep­tance to the extent that it is now the de facto stan­dard in prod­uct selec­tion for e-commerce.

Dynamic tax­onomies work on mul­ti­di­men­sional tax­onomies (usu­ally orga­nized by facets) and pro­vide a sin­gle, coher­ent visual frame­work in which users can focus on one or more con­cepts in the tax­on­omy, and imme­di­ately see a con­cep­tual sum­mary of their focus, in the form of a reduced tax­on­omy derived from the orig­i­nal one by prun­ing unre­lated con­cepts. Con­cepts in the reduced tax­on­omy can be used to set addi­tional, depen­dent foci and users iter­ate in a guided yet uncon­strained way until they reach a result set suf­fi­ciently small for man­ual inspection.

The access par­a­digm sup­ported is acon­cep­tual explo­ration, far more fre­quent in “search” tasks than the retrieval by exact spec­i­fi­ca­tion sup­ported by search engines and data­base queries. The under­ly­ing model is sim­ple and eas­ily under­stood by users, offers sub­stan­tial ben­e­fits over tra­di­tional approaches and has an extremely wide appli­ca­tion range and a poten­tial for impor­tant exten­sions. This 1-day work­shop will dis­cuss all aspects of dynamic tax­onomies and faceted search, from under­ly­ing tech­nol­ogy to user inter­faces and com­mer­cial use, includ­ing demo sys­tems and applications.

Top­ics of Interest:

Top­ics of inter­est include, but are not lim­ited to the fol­low­ing areas: • Multidimensional/faceted tax­on­omy design • Auto­matic or semi­au­to­matic multidimensional/faceted tax­on­omy cre­ation from meta-data, from struc­tured and unstruc­tured doc­u­ments or by social tag­ging • Exten­sions of dynamic tax­onomies • Effi­cient and scal­able index­ing and retrieval • User inter­face issues • Emerg­ing appli­ca­tions • Eval­u­a­tion approaches and metrics

Hand in your papers!