what are facets in MarkLogic

Question

I have going thru the facets topic in MarkLogic. I searched over the internet but found advanced topics of how to create and range indexes etc. But, I am lacking the basic to understand what exactly is it.

Can anyone help me explain in a normal language?

Answer 1

A facet is a grouping of records based upon an indexed term or range of values.

a constraint used for navigation on search results, providing a set of values that exist matching documents. Facets usually include a count of the resulting number of distinct values. Facets returned by a search include the counts and values needed to generate the user interface for the results. For example, a data set of articles could provide facets on author and publication date.

Think of various websites that present price ranges, sizes, and other means of filtering and categorizing the list of items on the website. They often show how many items match a given term, and allow you to click on them to apply as a filter to your search and further narrow your search.

Faceted search is a technique which involves augmenting traditional search techniques with a faceted navigation system, allowing users to narrow down search results by applying multiple filters based on faceted classification of the items. A faceted classification system classifies each information element along multiple explicit dimensions, called facets, enabling the classifications to be accessed and ordered in multiple ways rather than in a single, pre-determined, taxonomic order.

Facets correspond to properties of the information elements. They are often derived by analysis of the text of an item using entity extraction techniques or from pre-existing fields in a database such as author, descriptor, language, and format. Thus, existing web-pages, product descriptions or online collections of articles can be augmented with navigational facets.

Facets can show grouped counts of values or buckets with ranges of values (i.e. less than $25, $25-$50, $50-100, more than $100) and can be used to constrain searches with faceted navigation.

Check out this MarkLogic blog post Searching with constraints and facets that provides a brief overview and example of how to implement.