Modeling Faceted Browsing with Category Theory to Support Interoperability and Reuse

Faceted browsing has become ubiquitous with modern digital libraries and online search engines, yet the process is still difficult to abstractly model in a manner that supports the development of interoperable and reusable interfaces. Existing efforts in facet modeling are based upon set theory, formal concept analysis, and light-weight ontologies, but in many regards, they are implementations of faceted browsing rather than a specification of the basic, underlying structures and interactions. We propose category theory as a theoretical foundation for faceted browsing and demonstrate how the interactive process can be mathematically abstracted in a way that naturally supports interoperability and reuse.