Faceted Folksonomies

I’ve been meaning to blog about fac.etio.us but Alan beat me to it. Basically, facetious allows you to create what amounts to a pivot table out of folksonomy-tagged web pages.

This is a better solution than creating faceted single tags (e.g., “arthistory:france”) that I made a while back because (a) it’s simpler, and (b) it doesn’t require any sort of mechanism for agreeing on a taxonomy of facets. If you want to search Flickr for French art and not get a billion pictures of family vacations in France, you can search for the “France” tag and pivot on the “art” tag.To try it out, take a look at this fac.etio.us result for the “education” tag. In addition to seeing all posts with that tag, you can also drill down by selecting from the list of other tags on the education-tagged posts. I see, for example, that some of the posts tagged with “education” also have an “art” tag. By clicking on that tag link, I get posts that contain both tags. It’s like a boolean search, but it also gives me discoverability, since it provides a list of other tags that produce a non-null search result. Likewise, I can pivot on information about the post creator, the site, the feed, and/or the date.

Very nice.

Michael Feldstein is the founder of e-Literate who currently works as the Senior Program Manager for MindTap at Cengage Learning. For more information, see his profile page.

Connect me on Twitter | Google + | LinkedIn | Website

Possibly Related Posts:

1. Tuning Folksonomies A while back, I posted an idea for checking to...
2. Interesting Interview with Flickr CEO O’Reilly Netowrk‘s Richard Korman has a fascinating interview with Flickr’s...
3. Distributed Categories: A General Implementation The guy who created BooksWeLike is now apparently working on...
4. Trying Out the Technorati Tags Thing With some reluctance, I have added “folksonomy” as a sub-category...
5. Technorati to Provide Folksonomy Tuning According to David Weinberger, Technorati is about to add a...