Interesting- fac.etio.us is a rip, mix, and refeed of del.icio.us. Found by way of
John the Blog (a.k.a David Weinberger), fac.etio.us is a product of Sideran Software (“navigation for the digital universe”), a maker of corporate tools that offer:
…intelligent search and retrieval applications lead you easily through oceans of uncharted corporate data to the relevant documents, products, and web pages that you need to find…. Our customers have slashed the time wasted by traditional text-based search methods, dramatically improving the quality and timeliness of their decisions. Seamark integrates gracefully with your existing information infrastructure, providing the results you want, when you want them. Our facet-based navigation explores the content using intuitive categories and keywords that match the way you think about your business. Navigation is so intuitive that new users can achieve superior results without any formal training.
You likely do not see news of fac.etio.us on the Siderean news, but the fact that it is there beside the corporate brohure-ware says that this company is doing some semi public R&D.
But back to what might be cool. Apparently, fac.etio.us is applying some of the keyword associaton logic of “faceted” searching by re-casting the last 5 days worth of del.icio.us feeds. From Joho:
Faceted classification assigns a set of parameters (facets) to the objects it’s classifying and then lets users sort them using the facets in any order. For example, appointments in your calendar might have facets for time, date, person, location, subject, and importance. You could then ask to sort first by person, then by location, and then by date, and a minute later walk through them by importance, then date, then subject, etc. In short, faceted classification systems let you construct trees with the roots and branches in whatever order suits you at that moment. And faceted systems never lead you down branches that have no fruit.
So, Siderean is playing around with doing a faceted classification of about five days’ worth of bookmarks at del.icio.us. In an email, this is what Bradley Allen, the founder and CTO, says:
Currently this is being updated hourly from three feeds: delicious, delicious/popular, and my own inbox feed. The RSS feeds are being transformed into slightly richer RDF using the Dublin Core and SKOS vocabularies, then loaded into Seamark and made navigable using dc:subject (tag), dc:creator, dc:publisher (site), dc:moderator (feed) and dc:date as the facets. Currently this is being updated hourly from three feeds: delicious, delicious/popular, and my own inbox feed. The RSS feeds are being transformed into slightly richer RDF using the Dublin Core and SKOS vocabularies, then loaded into Seamark and made navigable using dc:subject (tag), dc:creator, dc:publisher (site), dc:moderator (feed) and dc:date as the facets.
So when I peeked, the facetious look offers a flickr-like font-size proportional view of tags, delicious creator, sites mentioned, as well as the 3 feeds mentioned above, and date added:
So in some sense, I have at a top level, 5 different content type paths to begin drilling down to, but within each, I have many more choices (based on the tags, the size of the tag telling me that there are more sites (or it is more popular). This is a rich choice of navigation paths– so my inner geek follows the PHP link, which presents a new facet of 98 tagged sites, the display based on listings that shows tags people have applied along side the PHP tag, the other 4 facets, and at the very bottom, the first 10 of the 98 (with links to see more):
And from there I find a nice site with tagging to my own set on 11 Cool Things You Can Do with PHP. In 3 clicks, I drilled down through 9700+ sites, to a more specific set of 98 things, down to one I found useful. The numbers of paths through the facets are near infinite, and have me thinking new ways on classification schemes- is these a layer of quasi structure on unstructured tagging?
But what do I know? I am no professional metadata maven. But this dog knows when something smells interesting.
