FleXplorer: A Framework for Providing Faceted and Dynamic Taxonomy-Based Information Exploration

Faceted and dynamic taxonomies are increasingly used nowadays in a plethora of applications. For developing user interfaces grounded on this interaction paradigm, it is advantageous to have a framework that enables the manipulation of the underlying information structure and provides the basic functionalities required. This paper introduces a formal model that captures faceted materialized taxonomies and the associated interaction-related notions. Subsequently, it discusses the current design (and implementation) of a general purpose framework grounded on this formal model. Finally, the paper reports some preliminary experimental and empirical results from using this framework and relational DBMSs.