Species Identification Through Preference-Enriched Faceted Search

There are various ways and corresponding tools that the marine biologist community uses for identifying one species. Species identification is essentially a decision making process comprising steps in which the user makes a selection of characters, figures or photographs, or provides an input that restricts other choices, and so on, until reaching one species. In many cases such decisions should have a specific order, as in the textual dichotomous identification keys. Consequently, if a wrong decision is made at the beginning of the process, it could exclude a big list of options. To make this process more flexible (i.e. independent of the order of selections) and less vulnerable to wrong decisions, in this paper we investigate how an exploratory search process, specifically a Preference-enriched Faceted Search (PFS) process, can be used to aid the identification of species. We show how the proposed process covers and advances the existing methods. Finally, we report our experience from applying this process over data taken from FishBase, the most popular source for marine resources. The proposed approach can be applied over any kind of objects described by a number of attributes.