Introduction

With the advent of electronic databases and the Internet, information professionals have been increasingly interested in the use of faceted schemes for classifying in the electronic environment. Professionals in the fields of knowledge management and web design, as well as Library Science, are also exploring the use of faceted classification to organize electronic information with positive results.

In the online environment, faceted schemes are being used successfully as an indexing tool and a large body of the LIS literature discusses faceted classification in this context. Faceted classification is also being used as a navigation tool in web design and is especially amenable to e-commerce sites where products can be grouped by broad categories and various facets within those categories, such as type, size, cost, etc.