Most elegant UI for categorizing items?

Question

I have a collection of items that the user needs to group/categorize in several ways. For the sake of an example, let\'s say it\'s a collection of cars and the user wants to cat

Answer 1

Faceted Classification is a way to categorize things that doesn't get the attention it deserves. It allows you to define mutually exclusive categories and provide a value for each content item for each category. For example, you could classify wines by region, varietal, vintage and price, and a user would conduct their search by picking one or more values in one or more categories. For example, “French or Italian reds under $40”. Assuming you have the category data at hand, this is often the most powerful classification and search technique available, better than trying to fit everything into a single hierarchy or relying on tags.

To implement this on the backend, make tables for each category and fill them with the distinct values. Then make a table what has a foreign key to each category table, together with a field that contains the content. This is similar to a “fact” table in dimensional database design.

To get an idea how this can works in the UI, take a look at Facetmap. I can’t vouch for their product because I haven’t used it, but I’ve implemented something similar for my own applications with good results.

http://www.facetmap.com/

Again, the ideas behind faceted classification deserve more attention, and I know I'm not doing them justice here. For an entertaining treatment of the subject by Clay Shirky, listen to "Ontology is Overrated":

http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail470.html