Archive for the ‘miscellaneous :)’ Category
Visualizing Facets
by Mark Burrell
Every UX designer working on faceted search and discovery applications faces a key challenge. How to present facets that instantly tell users:
What’s available within the collection or information space?
Which actions will help users meet their goals?
To meet this challenge, faceted user interfaces need to summarize the information space in a readily comprehensible way and [...]
In: IA, Search/BI convergence, UX, miscellaneous :)
Listening to the Customers’ Story
by Pete Bell
My favorite part of the Endeca year just started with our sixth annual call for Navigator Award nominations, recognizing the most visionary Endeca deployments. What’s most fascinating to me about the awards is hearing our customers tell their stories in their own words.
We have our own narratives about each facet of the Endeca story. For [...]
In: Search/BI convergence, miscellaneous :)
Faceted Search, Without Electricity
by Pete Bell
Yesterday, Paul Sonderegger blogged great examples of reporting and filing systems from before the days of computers, including DuPont’s “chart room” and the 19th century invention of the vertical file. Beyond their appeal to fans of oak cabinetry, those early systems remind us that the design of a system can be independent of its implementation, [...]
MBAs As Data Designers
by Paul Sonderegger
The Haas business school at University of California Berkeley is reinventing itself for an information-rich world. Mixed in with the usual themes of leadership, culture, innovation is a new one – experimenting with information. And this is changing the way some of the classics are taught. According to The Economist, “the focus of [...]
It Listens More Than It Speaks
by Pete Bell
“If men do not pour new wine into old bottles, they do something almost as bad — they invest old words with new meanings.” That’s Herb Simon’s warning at the beginning of his landmark speech, “Designing Organizations for an Information Rich World.”
Last time out, I willfully ignored him, making the claim that Simon, father of [...]
Test driving a pre-release of the first supercomputer in a box
by Adam Ferrari
Adam Ferrari
I’ve spent the last week testing pre-release hardware for Intel’s Xeon 7500 series of processors, and yesterday evening at their New York City launch event. (Full disclosure – Intel is an investor in Endeca, but they have not had any input into this post.) In many ways the 7500, better known by its code [...]
How do you build faceted search for a Presidential archive?
by Pete Bell
Pete Bell
Who’s the most popular modern President? JFK, by a factor of four, if you pick the traffic to presidential libraries as your metric. It’s for this reason that the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum has been the model of innovation for all the presidential libraries. And with the 50th anniversary of his [...]
Oprah weighs in on facets
by Pete Bell
Pete Bell
Don’t take your metadata advice from Oprah. Or from Lifehacker.
Lifehacker, a blog with tips that are usually excellent, missed in “Banish the Miscellaneous Category When You’re Organizing,” excerpted from an O!, The Oprah Magazine article called “The 10 Habits of Highly Organized People”:
Never label anything “miscellaneous”
You put a bunch of things into a file [...]
Even Trees Are Networks
by Pete Bell
Paul Sonderegger
We all know that trees start with roots, grow a trunk, then branches, and then keep branching all the way out to the leaves. But it turns out the leaves themselves don’t branch like that. Instead, according to a recent paper in Physical Review Letter, “Damage and Fluctuations Induce Loops in Optimal Transport Networks,” [...]
You Can’t Run A Company On A Single Version Of The Truth
by Paul Sonderegger
Paul Sonderegger
Last week’s Data Warehousing Institute conference (TDWI, for all you cool data people) is one of the big events for business intelligence (BI) professionals. I was there to check up on the state of the industry and get a peek into the future. And there’s a big contrast between the two.
Bill Baker, CTO of [...]
