This is a call for participation to the First Workshop on Faceted Search organized in conjunction with  SIGIR 2006, to be held on Aug 10, 2006, in Seattle, WA.

Background:

The web search world, since its very beginning, has offered two paradigms:

• Navigational search uses a hierarchy structure (taxonomy) to enable users to browse the information space by iteratively narrowing the scope of their quest in a predetermined order, as exemplified by Yahoo! Directory, DMOZ, etc.
• Direct search allows users to simply write their queries as a bag of words in a text box. This approach has been made enormously popular by Web search engines, such as Google and Yahoo! Search.

Over the last few years, the direct search paradigm has gained dominance and the navigational approach became less and less popular. Recently a new approach has emerged, combining both paradigms, namely the faceted search approach. Faceted search enables users to navigate a multi-dimensional information space by combining text search with a progressive narrowing of choices in each dimension. It has become the prevailing user interaction mechanism in e-commerce sites and is being extended to deal with semi-structured data, continuous dimensions, and folksonomies. This workshop will discuss all aspects of faceted search, from underlying technology to user interfaces and commercial use.

Topics of Interests:

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following areas:

• Facet creation from document meta-data and from document content through text analysis
• Facet creation from XML corpora and database records
• Facet creation by social tagging and folksonomies
• Efficient and scalable indexing and retrieval of faceted data
• APIs and frameworks for faceted search
• User interface issues in faceted search
• Faceted search in the mobile and pervasive domain
• Faceted search in e-commerce applications
• Faceted search and data mining, OLAP and Business Intelligence applications
• Emerging applications of faceted search
• Faceted search in the presence of imperfect, noisy data

Program

The Workshop will consist  of technical presentations, demos and one invited talk. For more details, see the Final Program of the  Workshop at http://FacetedSearch.googlepages.com/workshopprogram

Registration, travel, local arrangements, etc:

 Please visit the SIGIR 2006 site at http://www.sigir2006.org/.

Workshop organizers

Andrei Z. Broder, Yahoo! Research, USA
Yoelle S. Maarek, Google Inc., Haifa, Israel

Program committee  

Andrei Z. Broder, Yahoo! Research, USA
David Carmel, IBM Research, Israel
Ed Cutrell, Microsoft Research, USA
Susan Dumais, Microsoft Research, USA
Adam Ferrari, Endeca, USA
Marti Hearst, UC Berkeley, USA
Yoelle S. Maarek, Google Inc., Haifa, Israel
Jacco van Ossenbruggen, CWI, The Netherlands
Gabriella Kazai, Queen Mary University of London, UK

Inquiries

Email to  Faceted_search_2006@yahoogroups.com