Faceted search & Flamenco
Project.
The facet search approach, which is currently widely used on numerous
e-commerce sites and various catalogs, dates back to the first years of the 2000s, when the Flamenco Project was presented - the first practical implementation of
previously expressed ideas for the development of search. I quote the fundamental goal setting
that is the basis of the project:
The Flamenco search interface framework has the primary
design goal of allowing users to move through large information spaces in a flexible manner
without feeling lost.
As the main example in this project, navigation through the
database of Nobel laureates was given. Despite the fact that the project's website still exists
and by clicking on the above link you can get acquainted with a lot of materials (publications,
presentations and even download the software used) - unfortunately there is no working demo.
This project was conceived, among other things, as to some extent filling this gap, and
accordingly, the data on Nobel laureates was chosen as an array of data, as in the original
Flamenco project. This project is not a direct copy, but it demonstrates the main features of
faceted navigation and may serve as a good demonstration of the advantages of the
approach
.
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
As a frontend framework this
website uses AMP – new
Google developing technology designed to increase the speed of your sites due to the certain
restrictions imposed on development (prohibition of the use of custom scripts etc. ) Due to the
novelty of the technology and these limitations currently existing AMP sites sufficient
technologically simple in the majority of cases, and in particular, I do not found at the
moment, any practical implementation of faceted search based on this technology. Nevertheless,
the statement made in this article 4 AMP Misconceptions That Are No Longer True
that implementing a faceted navigation system in AMP is entirely possible
prompted me to fill this gap as well. If you know about existing and earlier implementations
then mine (July 2021), please write to the forum.
WikiData
WikiData, one of the projects of WikiMedia
Movement (primarily known by Wikipedia), was chosen as the source of the basic data.
Unlike Wikipedia, WikiData concentrates on collecting structured data, but also like Wikipedia
allows any inhabitant of the Earth to supplement and edit data and freely use it for their own
purposes and projects. In the card of any of the Nobel laureates, you can find a link to the
source of data on this person and supplement or correct this information, especially in terms of
the language of which you are a native speaker. This site is regenerated every 2 hours for all
15 languages used, based on
WikiData as a data source. Thus, the additions you have made to WikiData will be reflected here
a little later. Part of the site's interface has been translated through an online translator
and we will be glad to hear comments from native speakers. Please write to the
forum.
ItemsJs
ItemsJS - pure javascript is used as the search
engine. This allows you not to use additional search servers such as Algolia or Elastic, that
makes the project more independent and simple and in particular demonstrates the possible
performance of this engine. This site uses a server-side implementation.
Credits:
Sergei Revkov - idea and coding
El Arby Sidi Aly - Knowledge
Graph extraction consulting
Mateusz R - ItemsJS author
Forum