The IA Checklist

Building an Information Architecture Checklist, by Laura Downey and Sumit Banerjee, Journal of Information Architecture (Fall 2010)

This author argues that "IA is foundational and also critical for both users and organizations" - and extends from infrastructure to user interface. This article provides a checklist of architectural aspects to examine and questions to ask.


" Abstract

Government environments often have prescribed complex processes for obtaining and implementing technology solutions. In order to encourage and enable information architecture (IA) in government systems, it is essential to embed IA within the current processes and to view IA as part of the overall architectural framework. The definition of IA used here is broad and inclusive spanning applications, the Web and the enterprise. A common focus exists aimed at organizing information for findability, manageability and usefulness, but the definition also includes infrastructure to support organization of information. This case study describes the development of an IA checklist in a large United States government agency. The checklist is part of an architectural review process that is applied 1) during assessment of proposed information systems projects and 2) design of solution recommendations before system implementation. "

Content Strategist

A taxonomy is a tool for improving access to content but that is only a very small part of much larger scene for managing content. Joe Gollner, author of the Fractal Enterprise blog, describes content strategy as an integrative activity that is needed to bring a variety of practice areas together in creating, managing, and deploying content (primarily web).

He shows the connections through a diagram developed by Richard Ingram in which the content strategist provides input to the information architect and interaction designer. Content strategy, he emphasizes, needs to be focused on the business goals of the organization.



The posting leads to a valuable Google Knol on Content Strategy - "an emerging field of practice". People working in the taxonomy specialty will note this description of a content strategist - "For instance, some specialize in content analysis, which roughly describes work with metadata, taxonomy, search engine optimization, and the ways in which the sound application of these concepts supports content."

It is important to all to keep the big picture of relationships in sight.

Value of Tagging Systems

Tagging Human Knowledge

Paul Heymann, from Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, delivered this lecture about tagging systems and their value. Only 15 minutes long.

"A fundamental premise of tagging systems is that regular users can organize large collections for browsing and other tasks using uncontrolled vocabularies. Until now, that premise has remained relatively unexamined. Using library data, we test the tagging approach to organizing a collection. We find that tagging systems have three major large scale organizational features: consistency, quality, and completeness. In addition to testing these features, we present results suggesting that users produce tags similar to the topics designed by experts, that paid tagging can effectively supplement tags in a tagging system, and that information integration may be possible across tagging systems"

Folksonomy Myths

Tagging Electronic Records - There’s No ‘onomy’ in Folksonomy, Susan Cisco, AIIM ERM Community (Jan 3)

Electronics Records Management requires methods and structure for classifying records and content. A folksonomy of user tags won't really do the job - says Susan Cisco in her blog - as she quotes from Tom Reamy in Folksonomy Folktales 2010 (KMWorld Dec 2010)

Reamy identifies a few myths:

+ Folksonomies are examples of the wisdom of crowds
+ Folksonomies are building bottom-up classification systems
+ Folksomomies are Working
+ Metadata works best when it is free – in the realm of Everyman

Susan Cisco adds from her experience - "My observation of folksonomy use at the enterprise level is that it hasn’t been very successful. Isn’t that what happens when organizations allow end users to organize and maintain records and information without management controls or naming conventions?"

Her recommendation: "A simple taxonomy appears to be a more reliable approach to tagging electronic records."

Plugging Gaps in Sharepoint

SharePoint Partners Can Plug Taxonomy Gaps, Leslie Owens, Forrester (Jan 2011)

It's widely recognized that Sharepoint is weak in supporting metadata and taxonomies even with recent enhancements in Sharepoint 2010. Forrester Research identifies the gaps and reviews the products that can be used to fill them. For fee.

Pitfall of Search

Art vs. Information Science, Ryan Tracey, eLearn Magazine (Dec 30, 2010)

The pitfall of search is that the search box makes us think we can see and access everything but it fact it's hardly the size of a mail slot on a door.



When we search we are like Ned Kelly on a horse looking at the horizon seeing only a tiny slice.

Ryan Tracey reflects on the Ted Canberra lecture by Dr Whitelaw who recommends we deal with this problem by showing everything through data visualization techniques. He notes that this may be good for exploring but not necessarily for learning. The learner needs "scaffolding" - a structure to the subject area. This can be provided through "categories and tags". Taxonomies, essentially - and taxonomies built by subject experts. He says (and I agree wholeheartedly), "I still believe in the value of an expert guiding a novice. I maintain the expert has an obligation to contribute his or her expertise to the knowledge repository, and to tag it appropriately."

Article also links to the excellent TedXCanberra lecture.

Promoting Faceted Navigation

Faceted Navigation: Grouping – An UnTapped Potential?, James Kalback, Experiencing Information (Dec 6)

Apparently the many people still need to be persuaded of the value of faceted organization of results. Kalback describes the merits of facets for improving relevance for the user and refers to Marti Hearst work in the 1990s at Xeroc PARC

The advantage is in the groupings - "The theory is, structuring a results list by clustering items around a topic better reveals “aboutness” of subsets of items, and this in turn potentially increases the chance of relevance. This isn’t only true in academic settings: studies show that grouping results can be of significant benefit in broader contexts on the web. ]"

Gives the World Digital Library as an example of a site that is applying a faceted construction.

Software for Creating A Taxonomy

Software for Taxonomy Creation and Management by Heather Hedden, FUMSI (Nov 2010)

FUMSI readers are fortunate to have Heather Hedden, author of Accidental Taxonomist, as guest writer at FUMSI. Here she offers a clear and simple guide of software you can use to create taxonomies - whether small where a spreadsheet can serve, to the other extreme of sophisticated large-system thesaurus systems.

Conclusion: "Choice of software should depend on your platform/system architecture, number and location of users, auto-classification needs, import/export capabilities or plug-ins, and the need to integrate with other business software systems."

Primer on semantics

Semantics in Practice - a primer from Enterprise Search Center (Dec 7)

Semantics - the idea of extracting meaning by analyzing words - is still being much considered to improve search, and soon the art of delivering the right advertisement. This article lays out many of the basics.

Today, a search engine (Bing is given as an example), can interpret our query and deliver a suite of information on travel queries such as a hotel.

"To achieve that vision, producers of content needed to add metadata to information resources. It was critical that data standards and ontologies—that is, formalized vocabularies of terms—were agreed upon so that anyone putting data onto the web could agree that “revenue” in one database was the same as “revenue” in another. There are a number of techniques for doing this, and the applicability of each depends on the complexity and flexibility required by a specific application."

Article gives several current examples and names products and companies.

Building Metadata Into the Filing Systems

Why Organize When You Can Search?, Jason Tiret, Information Management (Nov 30)

Information professionals have long debated the relative merits of using keyword search versus doing some indexing of key terms - and should those terms by user selected (the tagging we know from delicious) or applied from controlled vocabulary? These issues get picked up in this article in which the author concludes, "Some heavy lifting up front to structure and tag the metadata will greatly optimize the search, retrieval and interrogation of the results for end users."

Using metadata well for indexing depends on planning for development and user access, and making definitions clear. Of course, governance and stewardship are two important principles in maintaining metadata that can be easily used and which will do the job of assisting in retrieval.