Search Technology
Education–Resources for Educators
A Faceted Approach to Searching: A New Demo Using Materials for Teachers
First, the content. “The Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) project is a consortium effort to provide educators with quick and easy access to the substantial, but uncataloged, collections of educational materials found on various federal, state, university, non-profit, and commercial Internet sites.” Now with the description of GEM out of the way, let’s move to the technology. This “new and enhanced” version of GEM has been online for about six weeks. It’s powered with search technology from Siderean, a company based in LA that takes a “faceted approach” to searching. Those of you who took a cataloging class in library school can skip the next part. What are facets? “Faceted searching combines searching for specific words and phrases with browsing descriptions of resources – based on what are called facets.” The famous or infamous Dewey Decimal Classification is a faceted system. I’ve always thought that this approach (easy to understand/learn) would be very useful for certain types of collections. Learn more in this brochure and white paper from the company. More on Siderean Semark in the future. Happy testing!
See Also: Other Demos Using Siderean Technology
The recipe demo contains thousands of entries. Useful!

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 28th, 2004 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.