SESF Workgroup - Faceted Browse
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This page will represent the work history of Faceted Browse for the eScience Framework Tool Set.
Contents |
General Requirements
Faceted browsing, as a popular mechanism of accomplishing exploratory search tasks, has been widely studied by various research efforts. In the SESF framework, the following high-level requirements are of particular interest to us.
- Rich user interface features
- Adding/removing of facets
- Sorting/filtering in facet
- Tabbed navigation for information resources
- Viewing source SPARQL queries to generate the user interface
- Flexible Configuration
- Define facets and relationships between them
- Integration with CMS and KMS systems, e.g., Drupal, MediaWiki, etc.
- Theming of the application
- Predefined skin templates
- User-defined CSS style sheets
- Saving current view (including the set of facets, their relationships, as well as the application layout, etc.) for later reuse
User Interface Design
Typically, the faceted browse interface consists of a set of restriction facets, a goal/objective facet, and an information panel. The restriction and goal facets are situated next to each other in the interface and above the information panel. The following figure depicts an example user interface from our BCO-DMO prototype.
Clicking on the blue link in the table will open a new tab displaying a table view for that RDF resource.
In the general workflow of a faceted browsing process, the user starts by selecting some values in one of the restriction facets F. This will lead to the update of the user interface in the following way:
- The values in all of the facets to the right of F are updated, according to the value of the current selection in F.
- The contents in the information panel are updated, also according to the value of the current selection in F.
After this, the user interface essentially presents a mixed view of the whole backend knowledge base that the faceted browser is based on. More specifically, the set of restriction/goal facets presents a more constrained view of the knowledge base, using the user selection as the filtering criteria; while the information panel shows a focused view of a particular information resource that the user selects. The former helps the user narrow down the search space by filtering out information that is irrelevant to the user, while the latter provides a more detailed context so that the user knows his interaction with the application better and therefore facilitates his decision-making.
The above selections in restriction facets are generally made from the leftmost restriction facet, moving right towards the goal facet. Finally, depending on whether there are any values left in the goal facet, the user can form the answer to his initial search question.
Next Steps
- Configurable user interface
- Defining restriction and goal facets
- Specifying the relationship between restriction facets and goal facets
- Configurable knowledge base
- Specifying the URL of any SPARQL endpoint
- Rich user interface features
- Different ways of displaying the information in the information panel (xsl translation, if it's an image show the image, if there is provenance show that fact)
- Drupal and MediaWiki integration
- Usability testing
Use Cases
Faceted Browse in S2S
The S2S Framework supports faceted browse interfaces, given the appropriate OpenSearch described services.
There are a few characteristics these services should have to be considered faceted search:
- Parameters for Result Queries should be optional
- For each parameter in each Result Query, there should be a Parameter Content Query which depends on all other optional Parameters
Here is a link to a more in depth description of S2S.
Here is a link to a presentation on S2S: File:Rozell Sept 3.pdf
