Explore Everything!
Faceted and dynamic taxonomies are used more and more nowadays in a plethora of application domains, and recently also in general purpose Web search engines. In brief, faceted metadata search engines can switch easily between searching and browsing and allow users to see exactly the options that are available at any time.
Features of faceted metadata search include:
fleXplorer is a main memory API that we have implemented for supporting faceted exploration interaction paradigm. In brief, fleXplorer allows managing (creating, deleting, modifying) terms, taxonomies, facets and object descriptions. It supports both finite and infinite terminologies (e.g. numerically-valued attributes). In addition it supports explicitly and intentionally defined taxonomies. Examples of the former include classification schemes and thesauri, while examples of the latter include hierarchically organized intervals (based on the cover relation).
The implementation is in Java, so the predefined ordering of built-in types (e.g. of int, float, String), as well as the customized ordering defined for user-defined Java classes (e.g. through the comparable interface) is exploited. To allow intentionally defined partially ordered domains, a partiallyComparable interface has been introduced and can be used by the developer. The framework also supports parametric types.