UIs for Faceted Navigation: Recent Advances and Remaining Open Problems

Faceted navigation is a proven technique for supporting exploration and discovery within an information collection. The underlying data model is simple enough to make navigation understandable while at the same time rich enough to make navigation flexible in a wide range of domains. Nonetheless, there remain issues in both the presentation of navigation options in the interface and in how to extend the model to allow more flexible discovery while still retaining understandability. This paper explores both of these issues.