Faceted Navigation of User-Generated Metadata

Bradley P. Allen, Founder and CTO of Siderean Software, Inc.

Bradley P. Allen is founder and CTO of Siderean Software, Inc., a leading provider of digital navigation solutions. Mr. Allen began his career as a member of the research staff at Carnegie-Mellon's Robotics Institute. As a senior member of the technical team at Inference Corporation he created CBR Express, one of the first case-based reasoning solutions for customer support. He was founder and CTO at Limbex Corporation, where he created WebCompass, an Internet search assistant that won Best Of Show at COMDEX Fall '95. Mr. Allen was also founder of TriVida Corporation, a Web site personalization application services provider, serving as CTO until TriVida's acquisition by Be Free, Inc. in 2000. Mr. Allen earned a BS in applied mathematics from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1982.

Abstract

Faceted navigation depends on metadata to organize and structure access to information. Traditionally, this metadata has come from relational databases, content management repositories and/or labor-intensive processes for the manual generation of subject and asset metadata by authors and/or specialists. However, applications are now appearing that instead involve end users in the generation of metadata, either through the creation of folksonomies through end user tagging or through the accumulation of usage metadata based on end user behavior. We discuss applications and work processes that blend these types of user-generated metadata with faceted navigation.

Slides