I too am very interested, and extremely concerned by these patent
developments for faceted interfaces. I attended a recent (November
2006) Endeca presentation for the U of Illinois library consortium in
which the sales representatives implied that the first Endeca patent
(May 2006) was just the beginning - that there were a number of others
in the works, and that they "weren't looking to put anyone out of
business" rather they indicated interest in collecting licensing fees
- to compensate them for their research and development.
A parallel thread just began on the FacetedClassification Discussion
(FCD) list -- but the response has not been as robust as we see here.
I'd love to move some of the examples just given - especially
regarding the effect/impact on the open source work - to this other
list with permission - or you can take this as an encouragement to
jump in over there -- http://poorbuthappy.com/fcd/ (occasional
traffic - but the archives are worth consulting).
As for Uta Priss' work I concur. Her CV:
http://www.upriss.org.uk/top/research.html contains links to many
relevant papers.
Other relevant work exists including that by Marti Hearst in her
Flamenco project -- recent pubilcations/tutorial are located here:
http://flamenco.berkeley.edu/pubs.html
Best,
Kathryn La Barre
Assistant Professor
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois
Received on Thu Feb 01 2007 - 09:29:06 EST