Chris,
: > Are there any ideas on how to support hierarchical facets?
It may be hard to roll out a truely "generic" way of sorting hierarchical
counts that would be usefull for people.
Thanks for the examples. I see what you mean about the difficulty in
creating a generic facet framework. It would be interesting to know if
any work has been published which enumerates the design patterns
involved. I found Marti Hearst's research paper "Design Recommendations
for Hierarchical Faceted Search" very useful...
http://flamenco.berkeley.edu/papers/faceted-workshop06.pdf
I hadn't considered the problem of a simple facet like a date
potentially being presented as a set of pseudo facets like decade, year,
month etc. That would require the query server to further split the
counts depending on how it was to be presented in the user interface.
Sure, sites like epicurious.com with their fixed number of simple facets
can be catered for in Solr. Future sites, based on thousands of facets,
some hierarchical, some Tag-like and some numerical would struggle I think!
- David
