To Conclude
Once upon a time, over 50 years ago, I collaborated in writing an article entitled “The need for a faceted classification as the basis of all methods of information retrieval”. A bold, brash claim! Since then we have had thesauri, relational data bases, taxonomies, ontologies, knowledge bases, topic maps, knowledge architectures and more (Vickery 2007). Yet in many of them we may detect signs of the old facet mole burrowing away. Recently he has been poking his nose a bit more visibly above the surface.
Clearly, it was an exaggeration to say that facets are the basis of all. To combine two facets is to imply a relation between them, but it is the explicit naming of relations between terms that is another theme in knowledge organisation, found in thesauri and ontologies but not in facets as such. Leaving such considerations aside, Broughton (2006) has recently given us a good account of the burrowings of the mole over the last 50 years. I hope and believe that he has a long life ahead of him.