I contributed to the user interface design chapter in the recent Springer book “Dynamic Taxonomies and Faceted Search – Theory, Practice, and Experience” (online version) edited by Giovanni Maria Sacco and Yannis Tzitzikas. Based on a definition of core principles and challenges, the chapter presents a taxonomy of navigation modes observed in existing applications. On that basis, design patterns for enabling these navigation modes in user interfaces as well as extensions and related approaches are discussed. The chapter closes with a section on personalizing faceted search.

The book itself covers a wide range of topics and current research questions related to Dynamic Taxonomies and Faceted Search from an academic point of view.

You can find a pre-print version of the User Interface Design chapter here. Thanks also to my co–authors Sébastian Ferré, Saverio Perugini, Jonathan Koren and Yi Zhang!

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!