Noise Between Stations

Category: Information Architecture

  • Hapax

    Hapax‘s FindEngine is a search engine system somewhat like Autonomy, but better according to some accounts, due to its unique use of computational linguistic analysis. They have an interesting way of displaying results/answers:

    Rather than delivering results in the form of links to documents that you then have to read to verify, FindEngine™ delivers answers in response to queries. The answers are returned in the form of sentences extracted from their original source…

    There’s a feel-good profile of the founder in Brainheart magazine.

  • Content Management Bible

    I’ve realized I’m much too stingy about buying books. Most books I would ever consider buying easily bring me enough pleasure or save me enough time to justify their cost. Add in the fact that you can easily resell them or pass them on to grateful people and the whole thing just gives me the warm fuzzies.

    Today’s Book Value of the Day is Bob Boiko’s Content Management Bible.

    A massive volume full of solid knowledge expertly written. Many people would save hours, days, or weeks of work if only they read this book before embarking on building a content management system. Building a medium or large system well is often difficult because, unless you’re a consultant, it’s rare to have previous experience. Shelling out a mere $35 to learn from other’s mistakes will pay for itself in one hour of saved time.

  • Organizational Design

    I have a long-time friend who is an organizational design consultant. She has a masters degree from Columbia University, works for a boutigue org design firm, and studied with Warner Burke, the leader of the field. She taught me a lot over the years. If you don’t have someone like this in your life and you find yourself entangled in organizations (doing, for example, Enterprise IA) you should own the book she recommends: Warner Burke’s Organization Development: A Process of Learning and Changing.

    It’s a small book, and not cheap, but probably available at your local academic library. It’s a primer, and a thorough one at that. It might help us stop whining about how organizations fail and instead learn how to fix them. It’s the first of my own little recommended book list that will hopefully unearth some different picks than what you’re used to seeing, the noise between bookshelves :) .

  • Great Minds Think Alike?

    The global navigation at Peter Morville’s Semantic Studios:
    Home, Consulting, Presentations, Publications, About

    The global navigation at Lou Rosenfeld’s LouisRosenfeld.com:
    Home, Consulting, Presentations, Publications, In the Media, Biography

    Later…Jess points out they, as well as the Nielsen Norman Group (Home, People, Services, Publications, Events, About NN/g) share the same design consultant, Studio Mobius.

  • Getting There: Enterprise IA

    Lou Rosenfeld posted his recent presentation to the AIGA Experience Design conference, titled Getting Established: ED for the Enterprise (Powerpoint).

    He writes, setting our expectations of results, ‘Timing: 3-6 years, not months…Remember: You’re turning an aircraft carrier with your foot as the rudder.‘

    Yes Yes Yes. This is half my job, sticking my feet in the water and kicking like crazy. Lou creates the most cogent summary of this situation I’ve yet seen. I think this is one of the two or three big challenges of our field: coordinating and syncronizing the publishing efforts of multi-layered organizations (I say organizations and not companies as this condition exists inside universities, governments, and large non-profits as well).

    IA’s can sometimes grab other fields as our own, enveloping information design, interface design, interaction design, etc. But IA for the enterprise is a central IA issue, an issue no one else is addressing (notice the subtitle of the Polar Bear book: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites. It is the scale that makes IA what it is). The knowledge management folks are doing noble work, but with a mandate even more idealistic than that of IA, and for this reason I think they are less likely to achieve practical results. Besides, they tend to focus on collecting and filtering tacit knowledge, whereas our focus is on managing and publishing the core knowledge of the organization.

    And yet there are other forces that must be brought to bear on this problem, organizational psychology, management, and IT are three that come immediately to mind. If we are to have a larger influence on projects outside our own, I have to think IAs must join with other disciplines to develop solutions as well as to gain credibility.

    What is the forum for this work? A new kind of book, edited with vision, pulling together a flowing collection of chapters from disparate points of view, informed by sound research, grounded in practical results, full of successful and unsuccessful case studies? Something else?

    I hear the new Polar Bear book includes some of these ideas. But if we are to spend 3-6 years on each system, if we are to find technical and management models that will work across organizations, if we are to influence those we don’t influence today, we may need more. This presentation starts down that path, don’t miss it.

    And, there’s an actual chinese menu.

    Later…this imaginary book probably couldn’t be published on the usual publishing model, there’s not enough enterprise people to justify it. Instead of a publishing house, a professional organization might sponsor something like this, and even if the price was high it could still be within the price range of this audience.

  • Print-Friendly Format in People-Friendly Language

    An informal survey:

    • Salon: ‘Print‘ icon + label, and the resulting page reads, ‘To print this page, select Print from the File menu of your browser‘
    • New York Times: ‘Printer-Friendly Format‘ icon +label (but, it’s the person we’re being friendly to, right?)
    • CNET: ‘Printer-friendly format‘ text link
    • SJ Mercury News: ‘print this‘ icon + label
    • Yahoo News: ‘Print Story‘ icon + text link

    I don’t want to give the impression that by clicking that link the page will be printed, ’cause it won’t, so ‘Print…‘ doesn’t work for me. I’m leaning towards ‘Printing-Friendly Format”.

  • Feeling Overwhelmed?

    Michael started a therapy thread to deal with the overload of passionate development our discipline current exhibits. While the straw on the camel’s back in this case is the latest flurry of basic semantic arguments saturating the SIGIA list, I recognize it as something many of us experience now and then. The thread offers some good advice.

    I think learning to be a consultant has taught me a method for dealing with overload from another perspective. Because I need to learn a lot about a business and new skills quickly, I’ve developed a sense for what I don’t need to learn ahead of time. I have a sense of the scope of topics and what can be dealt with on a just-in-time basis. Then the question becomes whether I spend the extra time reading more or on the beach?

  • Introduction to Ontologies from McGuinness

    Deborah L. McGuinness, ontology goddess, released Ontologies Come of Age, a chapter to an upcoming book. A relatively gentle introduction, along the way she illustrates the difference between controlled vocabularies and ontologies: the former have implicit is-a relationships and the latter have explicit is-a relationships (e.g. in a taxonomy a Merlot is a narrower term of Red Wine, whereas in an ontology a Merlot is-a Red Wine). Expressing those relationships explicitly helps computers understand what we understand. So it’s more like knowledge representation, though it relies on the classification techniques of controlled vocabularies.

    She’s done hardcore research at Rutgers, AT&T, Lucent, & Stanford and seems to be looking for wider applications of this work via Sandpiper Software.

  • Insights From LIS – Marcia Bates

    Marcia Bates’ After the Dot Bomb reveals a few methods those of us without information science educations should know about. It’s a bit finger-wavey (you web design whipper snappers you!) but it’s worth reading. Also, she’s way off the mark regarding ontologies, but that’s a rant for another day.

    Eric unearths a related link, The fundamentals of information science, wherein a university librarian bullet points some big ideas from that field.

  • Dublin Core Tempate

    Joe Clark points to the oh-so-handy Dublin Core Template. Adding proper metatags to your page couldn’t be much easier, ‘cept for the lack of XHTML support.

    In his Dubliners he correctly mourns the lack of Dublin Core metadata in the world. And while his idea of a self-organizing-web-through-metatags theory is fascinating, I don’t agree with his related assertion that Google is a monopoly. Google is just now going mainstream (I recently heard Jim Lehrer on The News Hour joke about finding some info using Google). At one time Yahoo! was the dominant engine, now they’re a Google customer. If Google can do that, so can someone else. If Paypal can beat MS at the payment game, then anyone is vulnerable. Personally I’m rooting for Teoma, if only they’d make the logical next steps.

  • Topic Maps vs. RDF

    Steve Pepper, author of The Tao of Topic Maps (and whose title, incidentally is Information Architect) – makes a concise, interesting comparison of Topic Maps and RDF, arguing for the former. Here’s a few points that struck me:

    One key difference – I don’t know if it is the key difference – is that topic maps take a topic-centric view whereas RDF takes a resource-centric view. That, to me, speaks of the LIS point of view vs. the W3C point of view on these matters, focusing on something that can be indexed vs. something that can have a URI.

    Because RDF is fundamentally a “framework for metadata”, i.e. for attaching property-value pairs to information resources, it can do the same job as facets. RDF could be used instead of facets, and would arguably provide more power (because of the recursive model and the fact that more metadata semantics, such as datatypes, are pre-defined). But to use RDF instead of facets would mean to lose the connection between the semantic network layer and the metadata, which today is provided for by the fact that facet types and facet value types are topics.

    chema, RDF has something topic maps don’t (yet), that is, a standardized way of expressing an ontology and the constraints upon it…Holger will be going one step further (I believe) with a concrete proposal for a topic map schema language….

    Ontopia, of which Pepper is the CEO, has published the The Ontopia Schema Language.

  • LombardiSearch

    In the left column you’ll notice I reinstated the LombardiSearch interface for searching the web. The point is to more easily choose the right search engine for a query based on the engine’s particular search method. In this case I’m using Teoma, Google, and AskJeeves.

    Thanks again to Mathew for the Javascript assist.

  • IA Case Studies I’d Like to See

    1. Slashdot. For the interplay of how information feeds into the interface design, how the whole system is tweaked to serve very high traffic efficiently, and the interplay of those two challenges.

    2. Classmates.com, for the brilliant-yet-evil way they suck you in, offering you a taste, getting a little info about you, giving you a little more, getting a little money from you, and so on. The lure is very strong; I can understand how they afford all those pervasive banner ads. For students of permission marketing this is a must experience.

  • Metadata Link-o-rama

    The Database Knowledge Base has a nice collection of metadata articles. I finally found a useful introduction/overview article to the whole topic, Metadata Principles and Practicalities.

  • Learning XHTML

    XHTML sounds scary to me. Once you put that X in the name I assume it’s over there, over that threshold of actually learning XML (as opposed to learning what it can do and collaborating with smarter folks who have actually learned it). That’s a pretty common threshold, from what I’ve seen. A lot of us can hack together HTML, maybe CSS or a bit of Javascript, but anything more is for ‘developers’.

    Then the other night T. says, ‘Oh, XHTML is the same as HTML 4, you just have to close all your tags.’
    Me: like meta tags and BRs, just close them?
    T.: Yeah.
    Me: [ ! ]

    Turns out XHTML can be quite simple. Of course, I realize there’s more to it, but ‘just close all your tags‘ might be the line that gets people in the door.