Thesaurus-based Access to Multimedia Collections: Faceted Retrieval Tools (FACET)

FACET investigated the potential of semantic expansion in retrieval in collaboration with the Science Museum (and National Railway Museum). It leveraged the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus facet structure in both the user interface and the semantic retrieval mechanism. Faceted systems combine concepts from a limited number of fundamental facets, as needed when indexing or querying. This flexibility allows highly specific, nuanced metadata descriptions but matching such compound descriptors poses significant challenges when searching. The FACET matching function addressed this challenge by generalising queries via semantic expansion of concepts. Results are ranked based on measures of semantic closeness. Semantic closeness is based on the minimum number of (weighted) semantic relationships that must be traversed in order to connect any two distinct thesaurus concepts. A faceted query editor facilitated the construction of multi-concept queries. A web based demonstrator ran until March 2017.