A principle drawn from cognitive science is to have 7+/- 2 facets in a faceted taxonomy, where 7 denotes the number of things people can remember at any given time. However, there are numerous factors that a taxonomist takes into consideration before deciding on the ideal number of facets while developing a faceted taxonomy.
A principle drawn from cognitive science is to have 7+/- 2 facets in a faceted taxonomy, where 7 denotes the number of things people can remember at any given time. However, there are numerous factors that a taxonomist takes into consideration before deciding on the ideal number of facets while developing a faceted taxonomy.
The first factor to consider would be the users of the content. If the users are internal and trained in facets, it is their job to classify and/or retrieve content by their facets, and hence, a long list of facets would not deter them. At the other end, internal, external repeat users or even the public would be comfortable with a minimum of facets as it would be easy to understand.
The next factor to consider would be the volume of content. Logically, a small collection of content assets does not need many facets, whereas a larger collection of content does. The important aspect here is to build several facets to filter and limit results without forcing the users to conclude the search is narrow and try to broaden it.
Sometimes, the taxonomy can influence user interface design, but often-content management systems do not offer much flexibility in how facets are displayed. In these types of instances, the first thing to do is to determine how many facets will be displayed without scrolling in the most commonly used devices. This could be a pointer for determining how many facets should be created.
To simplify, when determining the number of facets, it is important to keep in mind that a faceted taxonomy is more than a single facet of topics alongside other non-taxonomy metadata. Furthermore, the idea behind developing a faceted taxonomy is to split up a large hierarchical taxonomy into various aspects. Hence, taxonomists need to take into account the users, content, and user interface when it comes to designing faceted taxonomies.
Click here to read the original article published by Hedden Information Management.
Please give your feedback on this article or share a similar story for publishing by clicking here.
