The 10 families
The families are how the coordinate system is read, not what it is made of. Each one gathers a group of the 34 facets, and a perfume's value on a family is the highest of that group rather than their average.
Why max and not mean
A note that is emphatically one thing and nothing else would score badly on an average. Sandalwood is almost entirely creamy wood and barely registers on the other 5 members of its family, so a mean would report it as a weak woody note when it is one of the strongest there is. Taking the maximum asks a different question: how far does this composition reach into the family at its furthest point. That is the question a family label is answering when a shopper reads it.
The 10 family values do not sum to anything. They are not shares of a whole, they are 10 separate readings, and a fragrance can be high on several at once without any of them being diluted.
The families
The family name goes to its own page; each facet listed under it goes straight to that facet.
Where the family layer is weakest
The release checks whether families are genuinely regions of the space using the hardest case. Fougere is not really a region: it is a structure, the co-presence of lavender, coumarin and oakmoss. On 202 fougeres a position-only classifier scored 0.79, well above chance, but 27% of them had a non-fougere as their nearest neighbour.
So position carries real signal and is not sufficient on its own. That is why the note list matters as much as the coordinates, and why we publish the facets rather than only the 10 labels on top of them.