Facet searches are a very powerful way of publishing databases, providing a guided search which does not require knowledge of the structure and content of the database. They’re widely used in shopping websites to guide you through a catalogue of tens of thousands of options, where they progressively filter out options and offer new filter options as a function of the filters already applied.<\/p>\n
Heurist has the unique ability not only to run these sort of filters but to allow filtering based on the characteristics of other records linked through several relationship steps. For example, in a theatre performance database you could find all theatres which hosted plays which featured actor(s) born in Stratford. This sort of multi-level query would normally require the writing of obscure SPARQL queries in a triple store or multiple levels of SQL queries in a relational database; in Heurist it can be set up in a couple of minutes by clicking through a simple selection wizard.<\/p>\n
While we’ve had facet searches for some years, work on the Beyond 1914 and Expert Nation projects in particular\u00a0has led us to make facet searches much more customisable and instantly embeddable into third party websites such as WordPress. The result can be seen in the customisation of searches on the Beyond 1914<\/a>, Expert Nation<\/a> and\u00a0Digital Harlem<\/a>\u00a0websites featured in our Projects<\/a> page; the code required to embed a search in a web page is immediately available by right-clicking on any saved search (see below).<\/p>\n