Facetlens : Exposing Trends And Relationships To Support Sensemaking Within Faceted Datasets / quote 4 of 4
Faceted classification (definition)
In faceted classification systems, the attributes of the items are grouped into multiple orthogonal categories called “facets.” For example, a database of books might have a Year facet to group together publications from the same year, and a Genre facet exposing attribute values like “fiction,” “his-tory,” or “education.” Providing multiple ways to reach items by presenting several facets simultaneously alleviates the drawbacks of any single categorization scheme.