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

Current access paradigms for the Web, i.e., direct access via search engines or database queries and navigational access via static taxonomies, have recently been criticized because they are too rigid or simplistic to effectively cope with a large number of practical search applications. A third paradigm, dynamic taxonomies and faceted search, focuses on user-centered conceptual exploration, which is far more frequent in search tasks than retrieval using exact specification, and has rapidly become pervasive in modern Web data retrieval, especially in critical applications such as product selection for e-commerce. 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 provide a coherent roadmap to dynamic taxonomies and faceted search. The individual chapters, written by experts in each relevant 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 recent research are highlighted. An additional chapter is completely devoted to current and emerging application areas, including e-commerce, multimedia, multidimensional file systems, and 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. Given that research results are currently scattered among very different publications, this volume will allow researchers to get a coherent and comprehensive picture of the state of the art.

Giovanni Maria Sacco is Associate Professor of Information Systems and HCI with the Department of Informatics, University of Torino, Italy. Before that, he had worked at Purdue University, at the IBM San Jose Research Lab (in the System-R group), and at the University of Maryland, among others. Sacco's work on security with Dorothy Denning was the first attack on key distribution protocols and one of the bases of MIT’s Kerberos. His work with Mario Schkolnick on buffer management for relational database systems introduced predictive buffer management. He introduced fragmentation, later known as recursive hash partitioning, the first sub-sort/merge join method, which is widely implemented in industry. Since the 80’s he has been active in the area of Information Retrieval, in which he led research and industrial projects. He introduced dynamic taxonomies (aka faceted search) and has published over 25 papers on this topic. He also holds several US patents in information technology.

Yannis Tzitzikas is Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Crete (Greece) and Associate Researcher in Information Systems Lab at FORTH-ICS (Greece). Before joining UofCrete and FORTH-ICS, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Namur (Belgium) and ERCIM postdoctoral fellow at ISTI-CNR (Pisa, Italy) and at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. His research interests fall in the intersection of the following areas: Information Systems, Information Indexing and Retrieval, Conceptual Modeling, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and Collaborative Distributed Applications. His current research revolves around faceted metadata and semantics (theory and applications), the P2P paradigm (focusing on conceptual modelling issues, query evaluation algorithms and automatic schema integration techniques), and flexible interaction schemes for information bases. The results of his research have been published in more than 45 papersin refereed international conferences and journals, and he has received two best paper awards (at CIA’2003 and ISWC’07).