Facets and GUIs

Toward a General Relation Browser: A GUI for Information Architects [PDF]

As the web matures, new tools for designers and information architects have emerged for created structured documents, however, creating interactive interfaces requires customized programming for each website and alternative view within the website. What is needed are tools and services that manage the graphical user interface (GUI) details and allow information architects to focus on organization and interaction design.
This paper presents the case of ongoing efforts to develop and test generalizable user interfaces that provide interactive overviews for large-scale websites, portals, and other partitions of webspace.

Right now I can’t imagine a one size fits all, but this paper documents some really interesting work towards exposing faceted classification in the UI. (Via the faceted classification listserv.)