i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Create a new Assignment Submission Page titled: "A4 - Your Name".  Make sure to tag it with the correct assignment tag ("A1" or "A2", etc). You must do this to ensure that we can see your assignment once you submit it. If you fail to do this or forget to tag your assignment, you may receive a late penalty since we will not be able to find your work.

Assignment 4: Ranganathan’s Ark

Posted: October 4, 2010

Due: October 11, 2010

Lead TA: Jess Hemerly, jhemerly@ischool.berkeley.edu

Course: Information Organization and Retrieval (INFO 202)

Assignment Overview

In this assignment you will:

1.     Familiarize yourself with an online tool for facet creation.

2.     Design a faceted classification for a provided set of instances.

3.     Adjust your classification given additional instances.

4.     Build and upload your faceted classification through the online tool.

5.     Reflect on your experience designing and iterating your classification.

Deadline

You must submit your work by creating a new assignment submission page before 9 a.m. on Monday, October 11, 2010. Late assignments will not be accepted unless you have an exceptionally good excuse.

Submission Requirements

You will submit a .zip file containing a copy of your Facetmap file and an HTML transformation of the XML report as detailed in the assignment instructions below. The file should be named YourNameA4.zip, replacing “YourName” with your name. You will also include a link to your Facetmap in the assignment submission page body field. 

1. Getting Acquainted with Facetmap

Get acquainted with the Facetmap web site at http://facetmap.com. In particular, look at the wine demo to see how the three facets of Varietals, Region, and Price combine to organize hundreds of wine instances. The demo will start up in the "Commentary Track" that explains what is going on as you specify facet values to select wines in the collection. Notice that there are three different user interface styles for the display of the facets and the items that are selected by different facet values. Think about the pros and cons of each style of display.

 2. Design A Faceted Classification

Once you have familiarized yourself with Facetmap, it’s time to start working on your classification. Review pages 12–16 in Chapter 6 of IFIOR, noting Ranganathan’s dimensions, the set of general criteria for facet design, and the principles guiding facet ordering. You will use these to design your own faceted classification to organize the set of instances provided here: http://www.polyvore.com/a4/set?id=23253828. You’ll notice that every instance is an animal or some representation of an animal. Remember that you are classifying the animal instance shown in the picture, NOT the type or class to which the animal belongs. You can see picture titles by holding your mouse over the picture. The titles provide important clues regarding how to classify your instance. “Mosquito” should not be in the same class as “Painting of a Mosquito,” nor are we looking for taxonomic classes (reptiles, insects, etc.).

You can have as many facets as you want, but you about to have at least four. You will need to be creative but make sure that anybody else could use them without your help. They can be abstract or practical or a mix of both so long as they classify the instances in a way that other people could understand. Also make sure that your facets are flexible enough to handle additions to the list of instances.

3. Testing Your Facets with New Instances

A good set of facets should be able to accommodate new instances without adjustment. Please do not look at these sets until you’ve built the classification for the original 10 instances. Choose one of these five groups of new instances (5 new instances in each one):

Group 1: http://www.polyvore.com/a4_extra_set/set?id=23396732

Group 2: http://www.polyvore.com/a4_extra_set/set?id=23398577

Group 3: http://www.polyvore.com/a4_extra_set/set?id=23402776

Group 4: http://www.polyvore.com/a4_extra_set/set?id=23403038

Group 5: http://www.polyvore.com/a4_extra_set/set?id=23403227           

 Revise your facets if necessary so that your system can classify all 15 instances.

 4. Encoding Your Work for Facetmap

Once you have a system that handles all your instances, encode it and all your instances using either the XML or the text file format shown on Facetmap. (http://facetmap.com/demosetup/)

* Facetmap's Limitations

Previous students ran into several quirks, bugs and limitations while using Facetmap. Several of these bugs have been resolved but we can make no guarantees that you won't stumble upon some brand new ones. Have patience, make note of any compromises or design changes you had to make because of limitations of Facetmap or facets in general and send email to the class list if you are having difficulties that other students might encounter.

Facetmap enforces a strict "occurrence exclusivity" principle in assigning values in a facet. This means if a library facet map has a "subject" facet that includes both a "War" and a "Peace" heading, your copy of Tolstoy's renowned work about both war and peace cannot be listed under both. Keep this in mind when designing your facets and facet values. This principle is what distinguishes faceted classification from "tagging" in the flickr or del.icio.us sense, where any tag can be assigned to any information resource or object regardless of other tags already associated with it.

After you've uploaded your Facetmap, it will be available for 7 days, but after that it may expire, so be sure to keep a copy of what you submitted.

5. Submitting Your Work

Upload your Facetmap file to facetmap.com, using this file naming convention: ischool2010_yourlogin (For example, the professor's facet map would be: ischool2010_glushko) 

Create a new assignment submission page. Include a link to your Facetmap on facetmap.com. Upload a zip file including your Facetmap file and a short report (name it YourNameA4Report) in HTML, creating it from XML using the report document type and XML transform that you used in Assignments 2 and 3. This report should have two sections, and each should be a paragraph or two. 

Section 1 should describe your use of the Facetmap program, especially any compromises you made in your design because of perceived limitations. 

Section 2 should answer the following questions:
* Were there sequence effects? That is, did you find that you had to work through them in a particular order to get to a classification you felt comfortable with?
* How did the context of the image affect your placement within a facet?

* How did you use Ranganathan’s PMEST in conceiving your facets? Was it useful?

* What were your biggest challenges in designing the classification?

* How well did your initial facet design handle the additional instances? What changes did you need to make to accommodate the new instances?