Facets #

A facet is a particular view of information. Information can have many facets.

Let’s get back to our example on trip reports. You’ve already picked out many facets or views to the reports. These are:

• By year
• By country
• By purpose

Note that facets have values as shown:

By year

• 2024
• 2023
• 2022

By country

• Singapore
• United States
• Malaysia

By purpose

• Academic conference
• Research collaboration
• Joint-exercise

Every trip report can now be assigned values from the list above.

Document	Year	Country	Purpose
x1.doc	2024	Malaysia	Academic conference
x2.doc	2022	United States	Research collaboration

Here are a couple of points to note about the table:

• It is very different from a folder structure—it is one big table
• Unlike the folder structure, this table does not include the physical document; it just gives a reference to the document, which might reside on a document server
• Every document is assigned values from the relevant facets

Facets offer significant advantages over trees:

• Start with any view: By year, country or purpose. You don’t have a choice with trees—you’re stuck with the view chosen by the person who created the tree.
• Search faster: For example, show all trip reports made to Malaysia in 2022 for academic conferences.

When you select facets, you filter or narrow the collection to show only the documents you’re interested in. Let’s look at a few examples to see how this works.

Facets have become the default way to navigate and search extensive collections online. When you buy something from Amazon or book a hotel on Expedia, you will most likely navigate through facets. However, faceted navigation is still a struggle on intranets. The reason is not a lack of high-quality applications but that no effort is made to identify and choose the right facets.

Choosing facets #

How do you pick the right facets for your information? By understanding how others would like to find your information.

Experts in information science have identified several facets that seem to apply to many types of information across many disciplines. These are listed below. You can use them as a reference or starting point.

General facets to information:

• By the thing, the kind or type of thing, or its properties
• By time
• By location
• By author
• By activity, task or operation

The facets for trip reports (the thing) match up as follows:

• Year (time)
• Country (location)
• Purpose (outcome)

Facets must be mutually exclusive (no overlaps). You cannot, for example, have a facet for Regions (North America, Asia, etc.) and another facet for Countries.

Countries

• Australia
• Singapore

Regions

• North America
• Asia Pacific

You might think of combining the two into a single facet, say, Locations. Even then, you cannot have terms that overlap in meaning. In the example below, how would you classify a trip to Singapore? Will it be under Singapore or Asia?

Locations

• North America
• Europe
• Asia
• Singapore
• Hong Kong
• Australia and Oceania
• Middle East

This does bring up an interesting scenario: What if you nest the terms?

The following is valid:

• North America
• Europe
• Asia
• -> Singapore
• -> Hong Kong
• Australia and Oceania
• Middle East

In other words, facet terms can be lists or categories. Keep this in mind, and you’ll be fine!

When to use facets? When to use trees? #

Trees are used when a single dimension or view of the organisation is enough. For example, consider this structure:

Staff handbook

• Leave
• --> Annual leave
• --> Sick leave
• Benefits
• --> Medical benefits
• --> Insurance plans

Now, you may want to control this structure. You want all the types of Leave to be in a particular order, and you want Insurance plans **to come after **Medical benefits. You may also want all staff to see this single view. In such a case, it may be better to use a tree.

If, on the other hand, you have 5,000 documents and a deliberate structure between the documents does not matter, then we can help staff find the documents using appropriate facets.

This brings us to the principle: if you want to present staff with a single, deliberate structure, use a tree. If you want staff to access the information from multiple views then use facets.