Dynamic Taxonomies and Faceted Search - Theory, Practice, and Experience

Current access paradigms for the web, i.e. direct access via search engines and navigational access via static taxonomies, have recently been criticized for their inability to cope with dynamic web pages often used in e-business applications like catalogues, map services, or personalized or contextualized pages . A third paradigm, dynamic taxonomies or faceted search, focuses on user-centered conceptual exploration, which is by far more frequent in search tasks than retrieval by exact specification, and has rapidly become pervasive in modern web data retrieval. It is a heavily interdisciplinary area, where data modeling, human factors, logic, inference, and efficient implementations must be dealt with holistically.

Sacco, Tzitzikas, and their contributors to provide a coherent roadmap to dynamic taxonomies and faceted search. The single chapters, written by experts in the relative field and carefully integrated by the editors, detail aspects like modeling, schema design, system implementation, search performance, and user interaction. The basic concepts of each area are introduced, and advanced topics and late research are highlighted. An additional chapter is completely devoted to current and emerging application areas including e-commerce, multimedia, multidimensional file systems, or geographical information systems. The presentation targets advanced undergraduates/graduate students and researchers from different areas (from Computer Science to Library and Information Science), as well as advanced practitioners. As currently research results are scattered among very different venues, this volume will eventually allow them to get a clear, coherent and comprehensive picture of the state of the art.