Dedicated faceted search engine for dealing with dynamic taxonomies - helps just with performance or also flexibilty?

Question

I\'ve been thinking for a while about modeling typical ecommerce site with ebay-like taxonomy and attributes dependent on a particular product category.

First attempt wa

Answer 1

What if you had different types of categories for different types of products?

Taking the eBay example, we would have Products that can be either Books or TV/Displays.

Books have title and ISBN, and may be in the sci-fi category, or in the erotic category, or in the non-fiction category, or autobiographical category. Or maybe you have a book that is in the non-fiction, autobiographical erotic categories.

Displays have screen resolution and watt-consumption (?), and may be in the flat-screen category, CRT category, or HD category.

From a purely relational point of view, you could maybe model this like so:

[Product]-(1)------(1)-[  Book  ]-(n)------(m)-[ book_category ]
| id    |              | title  |              |  name         |
| price |              | ISBN   |
| ...   |
| ...   |-(1)---(1)-[   display  ]-(n)------(m)-[ display_category ]
                    | resolution |              |  name            |
                    |   watts    |

Instead of modeling attributes dependent on a particular product category, you would have different properties and categories dependent on the type/class of product.

See supertypes & subtypes