See also FacetsEngine, PagesHierarchy, FacetBrowsingTheme.

The situation

1. Some people and organizations feel they need a hierarchical organization/access to wiki pages. But applying categorization to page names (AKA subpages) can be problematic as seen in the discussion in PagesHierarchy.

2. At the same time, WikiCategories are (well?) known, already working and powerful mechanisms to organize information in a wiki, but somehow they don't seem to fulfill the subjective need for hierarchies, that should supposedly be "autogenerated" in a menu by some means.

3. Facets are simple and very powerful, requiring no previous dictionary or rigid classifications, and allow any node (page) to be located on more than one group, and to change those groups over time.

Facets references, or, what the hell are those facets anyway?

In short: facets are ways to categorize information (or MetaData).

Some quick references about facets:

• History of facets, including it's creator (brief): http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/ranganathan_for_ias.php

• Information Architecture Wiki (brief) synthesis: http://iawiki.net/FacetMap

• FacetedNavigation and browsing of wiki content (based on Pikie Pikie): http://www.kimbly.com/cgi-bin/diamond

• Meatball facet links (long): http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?FacetWiki

Proposed solution and its benefits

Use facets in the categories (or MetaData) instead of the page names.

If we agree on some standard use:

• the hierarchy menu could be created on the fly, but pages would still be named simply, no matter to which groups they "belong" at any time (AutomagicalMenus).

• The specific used mechanism is still categories -implemented with backlinking- which are already working (implementation discussion on FacetsEngine).

• There is no previous or fixed tree to agree upon, nor even need to categorize every page on every facet (PagesHierarchy).

• Only groups (or hierarchies) with at least one page will be shown, since they are created "bottom up". No zero content groups (FacetedNavigation).

For specific examples, please follow to AutomagicalMenus.

Facets, MetaData and semantic Moin

Facets, MetaData and the ResourceDescriptionFramework could help us to go to SemanticMoin.

Comments

Yes please, this sounds wonderful, and is very similar to what I mentioned at MoinMoinIdeas/AdamShand. -- Adam.

Using facet is easy and natural - we do it already in MacMac without knowing the term, by applying multiple categories to pages.

The Flamenco project at Berkeley (http://bailando.sims.berkeley.edu/flamenco.html) has developed an interface for browsing faceted MetaData. Flamenco has been influential in InformationArchitecture (IA). IA grew originally out of library and information science, which is the intellectual home of facets, faceted metadata, facet analysis, etc. The recent InformationArchitecture Summit (http://www.iasummit.org/) included several talks on implemented faceted systems. --KarlFast

• It seems great. Can it be plugged to other systems? --EM

I Moved the sidebar layout and the comments about it to FacetBrowsingTheme. -- NirSoffer 2004-07-07 00:39:07

Yes, please, this is exactly what I'm missing in MoinMoin! Some questions: can one page be under two values of the same facet, like two authors or two topics? And, will facets have subcategories?

• Many values of the same facet seems natural and useful, same as Categories. About subcategories, it is still undefined.