Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Nice to see Ranganathan getting some overdue posthumous PR. This piece does a fine job of explaining his basic concept of facets in readable prose (no mean feat), but I think you may be overstating the claim a bit by conflating faceted classification with relational databases in general. While Endeca seems to owe a clear debt to Ranganathan, some of the other examples you cite - like iTunes, Monster.com or Eddie Bauer - appear to be pretty straightforward database-driven sites that happen to slice data into a few different categories. I suppose you could call that "faceted," but by that token isn't just about every advanced search page on the Web? Better examples could demonstrate the kind of iterative querying that makes facets so potentially useful on the Web, like Berkeley's Flamenco or Amazon Diamond Search (insert your own facet pun here).

I may have stretched the category too far. I wanted mainstream examples. Barnes & Nobel is a good one; it's truly faceted. Thanks for catching this. I'll try to get better examples.

Although it is true that Colon Clasification isn't used outside India, Bliss Classification, a fully faceted bibliographic scheme ( http://www.sid.cam.ac.uk/bca/bcahome.htm ) is widely used in academic libraries in the UK and the Universal Decimal Classsification ( http://www.udcc.org/about.htm ) is a partly-faceted development of Dewey very widely used throughout Europe particularly in special libraries.