New Feature of the RP Photonics Buyer's Guide: Concept Trees for Product Categories

Building a systematic product taxonomy is not just cumbersome, but meets fundamental difficulties. Take lasers as an example; they are commonly organized in several different ways:

• by technology: e.g. solid-state lasers, gas lasers, free-electron lasers
• by operating principle: Q-switched lasers, mode-locked lasers
• by qualities: pulsed lasers, picosecond lasers
• by applications: seed lasers, alignment lasers, medical lasers

For our Buyer's Guide, we could not simply decide on one particular type of categorization; we need to accommodate all of these terms. But that makes a single, global category tree impractical: Many products would need to appear under multiple parents. Some competitors have actually taken such a route, but it is suitable only for a rather coarse categorization — not something as detailed as in our directory, which currently has as many as 786 product categories.

For such reasons, we simply started with a “flat” list of product categories and assigned each one to one or several top-level categories like “fiber optics” or “lasers and laser amplifiers” — without forcing every item into a rigid universal tree. And now we have introduced these concept trees, which are not parts of one universal hierarchy; rather they are lightweight local maps that illustrate only the surrounding semantic neighborhood — suitable to help users navigate quickly, while not forcing us to box all products into a single, awkward taxonomy.

In order to further facilitate the concept trees, we have introduced a couple of more general categories such as polarization optics. While users may often prefer using a more specific category, the new parent categories allow us to group them all nicely, making it easy to get from one to another.

Earlier this year, we introduced an AI-based semantic search that further helps users to find appropriate product categories. In the input field “product keyword”, one can enter any term, press the Enter key, and our system will list semantically related categories. For example, if you enter “launch to fiber”, you find “fiber launch systems” as the suitable category.