Noise Between Stations

Category: Information Architecture

  • Notes from ASIS&T Annual 2002

    Notes from ASIS&T Annual 2002 Monday, November 18
    Just spurious notes from what I saw, in general a very good conference:

    Plenary with Lee Strickland Thomas Blanton: Openness and National Security
    I went in thinking this talk would be boring, but found it very interesting and by the end I was convinced we all need to spend at least a bit of time thinking about how to handle the openness of information within our organizations. I found Tom Blanton particularly insightful, pulling together observations from various inside Washington venues to paint a picture for outsiders.

    U.S. government has increased powers to seize information following 9/11. If they show up, we should know

    • What to do
    • Who (lawyer) to call
    • How to handle the event


    Law enforcement can intimidate with badges and guns, but of course they need the appropriate court order to seize anything.

    Session on Metadata
    Elizabeth Liddy and her colleagues at Syracuse are doing great work with metadata. She covered three projects.

    • Automatic metadata generation through natural language processing.
      • A key factor in improving results was informing the system with domain-specific information
      • Used Dublin Core and GEM
      • Information Extraction method

      It’s sponsored by NSF funding spread across partnering universities.

    • Standard Connection used a standard compendium that maps together various state school standards. The system then attempts to automatically map a resource to standards.
    • Metatest is a two-year study questioning our assumptions about the value of metadata. One section of it was interesting in that they combined eye-tracking studies and think-aloud protocols.

    Terrance Smith presented on knowledge representation of scientific info. He used three projectors in class to display three perspectives on info: outline, metadata, and data. The layout of the information suffered, exposing the difficulty in taking highly structured concepts and relationships and presenting them naturally. He observed that concepts are harder to index than terms

    Marcia Lei Zeng of Kent State: There’s a trend toward enhancing standard metadata formats like Dublin Core with domain-specific fields. This parallels development of custom markup languages and metadata formats. The idea reinforced the importance of semantic markup. Most of the time I’m dealing with chunked content, each chuck having its own metadata. But if forced to work on the document level it could be important to sync your metadata format and markup language.

    Eric Miller and James Hendler of the W3C presented an overview of the semantic web, RDF, and OWL. Nothing new, but great to hear it being evangelized at ASIST by two smart, effective presenters. SWAD (semantic web advanced development). Check out their initiatives. He repeated the formal ontological features that differentiate them from controlled vocabularies, like semantic restrictions on property relations, range, domain, cardinatlity, logical sets, inverse relationships (same but from the opposite view, like parent of and child of) etc. Some German organizations who signed up: DFKI, Forschungszentrum Infomatik. The layer cake continues to be an important model, they both used it in their presentations – We need to acknowledge in these activities that creating metadata (any kind) is hard and it needs to be reused enough to provide value or else it’s not worth creating – Miller is using the Razor collaborative spam app

    Also see U of Maryland’s Mindswap – The Semantic Web Research Group

  • Bottom Up

    Peter Morville has an interesting new article at New Architect: Bottoms Up. In it he advocates more bottom-up design, reacting against overly reductionist top-down methods. But I think his philosophy is actually a balance of the two, and he’s trying to advocate this balance. Take this excerpt:

    I have been flabbergasted in recent months by taxonomy construction projects in Fortune 500 companies. Some completely lack user research, and there is often a fierce resistance to discussing how the taxonomy will be used. Let’s just focus on the taxonomy, they say. We don’t want to get distracted by implementation details.

    Interestingly, I’ve been experiencing the opposite scenario. Recently I’ve been meeting people, usually technologists toking at the XML pipe, who only want to do bottom up design. When I ask, ‘Who are the users? What are their intentions? What is the scope of your project?’ I find a lack of solid answers. Balance (of top-down and bottom-up) is my new rallying cry.

  • metadata is labeling for computers

  • Ontology Building: A Survey of Editing Tools

    Excerpts from Ontology Building: A Survey of Editing Tools:

    With databases virtually all of the semantic content has to be captured in the application logic. Ontologies, however, are often able to provide an objective specification of domain information by representing a consensual agreement on the concepts and relations characterizing the way knowledge in that domain is expressed.

    All ontologies have a part that historically has been called the terminological component. This is roughly analogous to what we know as the schema for a relational database or XML document. It defines the terms and structure of the ontology’s area of interest. The second part, the assertional component, populates the ontology further with instances or individuals that manifest that terminological definition. This extension can be separated in implementation from the ontology and maintained as a knowledge base.

    CL – Common Logic is the emerging successor to the KIF ontology construction language.

    The wide array of information residing on the Web has given ontology use an impetus, and ontology languages increasingly rely on W3C technologies like RDF Schema as a language layer, XML Schema for data typing, and RDF to assert data.

    …tools, like Microsoft’s Visio for Enterprise Architects, use an object-oriented specification language to model an information domain (in this case, the Object Role Modeling language). These tools presently lack useful export capabilities, although independent tools to convert between UML and ontology languages like DAML+OIL are under development.

    Methodology…in today’s tools…explicit support for a particular knowledge engineering methodology (like KADS) is not common.

    Interoperability…Ontologies are for sharing…One consideration in the enterprise realm, for example, is the ability of a domain ontology to accommodate specialized XML languages and controlled vocabularies being adopted as standards in various industries. None of the current ontology editors address this capability. Interoperability, instead, is being addressed simply through an editor’s ability to import and export ontologies in different language serializations.

    Usability…The standard approach is the use of multiple tree views with expanding and contracting levels. A graph presentation is less common, although it can be quite useful for actual ontology editing functions that change concepts and relations. The more effective graph views provide local magnification to facilitate browsing ontologies of any appreciable size. The hyperbolic viewer included with the Applied Semantics product, for example, magnifies the center of focus on the graph of concepts (without labeled relations). Other approaches like the Jambalaya plug-in for Protégé-2000 achieve a kind of graphical zooming that nests child concepts inside their parents and allow the user to follow relations by jumping to related concepts. Some practitioners however, such as GALEN users, indicate a preference for non-graphic views for complex ontologies.

  • Day 2

    11:46pm: The Institute launched today and the reaction was unexpectedly great. A fair amount of positive comments, links, and new members. The skeptics, rather than simply bashing, asked smart, pointed questions, the same questions we’ve been asking ourselves for the past several months. We have good reasons for starting the venture, we have a vision and ways to make it work. We have a structure to lend stability and incentives to attract resources. As a place-less organization we can be nimble and distributed. As an organization without employees there’s less power-hoarding and ego-stroking. We’re all a little idealist and yet practical enough to make it work.

    But to the question ‘What are you going to do?‘ we don’t have any hard answers. And that’s part of the beauty. With only a skeleton of top-down oversight we allow lots of ideas to spring up from the bottom and possibly flower. More sustainable than pure volunteer efforts, less stifling than previous notions of what this kind of group could be. I myself am still learning to step back, yield control, and let the experiments run, while still offering guidance or assistance.

  • Launch: AIfIA

    November 4, 2002 – Information architects from across the world today announced the launch of the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture (AIfIA). The leadership of AIfIA includes expert practitioners, teachers, and authors from organizations including Yahoo!, AOL/TimeWarner, IBM, Lucent Technologies, MasterCard International, Wells Fargo, Wachovia Corporation, Razorfish, Adaptive Path, the Transportation Security Administration, the University of North Carolina and the University of Texas.

    AIfIA is a non-profit volunteer organization that serves as a resource for organizations and individuals seeking to learn more about information architecture and its benefits, and assists information architects who wish to promote the field. Information architecture, the art and science of structuring and classifying information on web sites and intranets, is a growing field that is becoming increasingly important in the modern information age.

    “Information architecture leads to increased revenue, decreased development costs, more effective communication and successful web sites,” said Christina Wodtke, AIfIA President and author of the book Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web. “AIfIA will be a resource for those wishing to learn more about information architecture, whether they’re exploring its benefits for the first time or they’re experienced professionals sharing tricks of the trade with their peers.”

    More information about AIfIA and information architecture is available at www.aifia.org.

  • The obligatory fake FAQ

    I had a good laugh when I was looking at Jesse’s book site and came upon a section titled The obligatory fake FAQ. This touches on one of those seemingly innocent requests that drive me up the wall: people who want to ‘create’ frequently asked questions. The original format was a beautiful thing, a bottom-up list grown organically from questions that need answers. But now that the format is popular, people sit down and make up what they think people will ask. Ugh!

  • Controlled Vocabularies in the Trenches

    Has anyone written about what it’s like to create controlled vocabularies (CVs) in the context of actual project work? I can’t think of any. Below are some spurious notes of my recent experience, probably not understandable to anyone else ’cause I don’t have time to instruct. We’re racing to deadlines and I’m driving as fast as I can…

    The exercise and deliverables can be rather abstract for some folks, especially if they view the world through a technology lens. It helps to create illustrations and screen shots to show what is meant and how terms are used.

    CVs become a very helpful as a way of recording the tacit knowledge of an organization, helping everyone communicate and use their information. The process of creating the terms helped clarify their use for the team in understanding the business. (It’s tempting at this point to ramble on about language being symbols for meaning, so we’re actually controlling meaning, and those who control meaning have the power to define reality (the power to name – Jansen)).

    If the CV is just informing other artifacts and not something that will be maintained or otherwise carried forward, state that so there is no confusion (e.g. do users of a CMS have to look at a thesaurus to discern meaning, or some other more user-friendly artifact?).

    Illustrating the CV within the process: Business’s understanding of reality -> CV -> CMS Manual and CMS user interface -> data and metadata -> UI (e.g. web pages). The CV helps build a bridge between the organization and the user interface.

    In all the talk of technology, IA, etc., ultimately people are coming for content. If the content sucks, the site sucks. (Content is king). Given that content creation and migration is also expensive, to properly honor the content developer’s work we need to put considerable thought into how content is created. A CV helps ensure the builders understand the subject domain and can communicate it to future content authors.

    There’s never a perfectly controlled vocabulary; the number of terms is finite and language can only be clarified to a certain extent. It may be necessary to state this fact to set expectations. It involves judgment calls regarding which terms to control, how to control them (e.g. supplying the definition vs. restricting use via the user interface), and how to define them.

    As with any design exercise, you need a scope, users and user intentions to guide the work. When defining the scope of the CV, determining the number of terms may seem arbitrary, but may be necessary given the other factors like time, money, and user response to the system.

    CVs for CMS may be used in various ways: to populate menus in the UI (“hard” control), to offer examples, to define terms for a manual (“soft” control), to determine metadata relationships, etc. Specify what you’re using it for explicitly to show its value.

    Not creating a CV before building a system can lead to expensive design and technology changes later if the designer’s conception of reality don’t match the users.

  • A Famous Information Architect

    Frank Lloyd Wright spent three months ‘doing nothing’ (I would imagine he was thinking) before sketching for three hours to produce the drawings for Falling Water. He could imagine the entire structure, and subsequently furnish the details. With each work he was allowed to experiment and push the boundaries. And clients came to him for his work, though of course he, as most famous architects do, relied on a staff of ‘apprentices’.

    Could an information architect – or an experience strategist or systems architect for that matter – become famous in the same way? Having three months to consider the user experience and design, defining the state-of-the-art with each project, being sought out for her ideas with a staff to assist with the work?

    We have gurus, but they often exist as our best critics and consultants, not designers. And we have fine design groups, but these don’t inspire the imagination like a single brilliant personality. This case study of Nathan Shedroff’s work teases me with the idea. Some foster the vision, but we’re certainly not there yet.

    I don’t expect one person to imagine and build everything; even the best architects rely on (brilliant but anonymous) engineers for collaboration. But one person could conceivably imagine the entire experience and design, from an enterprise information architecture down to the detailed interaction design. It might be on the scale of, say, designing Amazon.com from scratch.

    Does anyone even want this? Regardless, aspiring to this – as designers, as educators, as patrons – might change our work in countless ways.

    Later…draftsmen! They had draftsmen! Jeez. Imagine having someone to make the beautiful drawings for you.

  • Looking into Storytelling

    I’m designing a site for my sister’s fiance’s business, he does interior design and construction contracting. While my idea for the IA and navigation is simple and workable, it just ain’t compelling. About Us, Services, Portfolio [yawn]… I asked the designer to spruce it up and she was like, um, ok…

    What do customers get from him in person? I think they get something like a story. Not told in the fashion of a story of course, but he tells them about what the company does (plot), where they do it (setting), who they are (characters), and – since he’s good at what he does – a happy ending.

    I’ve attended an IBM seminar on using storytelling in design and caught the flavor of it, and thought it might work perfectly here. So, what do I need?

    Some characteristics:

    • A single theme, clearly defined
    • A well developed plot
    • Style: vivid word pictures, pleasing sounds and rhythm
    • Characterization
    • Faithful to source
    • Dramatic appeal
    • Appropriateness to listeners

    Dan Gruen from Lotus describes them as

    • Fleshed-out Characters
    • Detailed Settings
    • Goals and Obstacles
    • Causality
    • Dramatic Elements

    Whereas he applies them as user-centered designers would use scenarios, I’m more interested in how the knowledge management people would use them, to actually convey information quickly and effectively, as well as compellingly. For example, I’ve heard that when the U.S. Secret Service needs to convey a lot of important information quickly – say, briefing the Secretary of State during a ride across town – they use a storytelling format.

    I’m imagining the general storytelling format might make it more interesting and perhaps easier to digest the basic information even if the actual presentation – a few web pages in my case – don’t actually build up a whole lot of “dramatic elements”. I’ll retain the usual navigation so the visitors can bypass the story or get more details at the end.

    A simple mapping resulting in four web pages:

    • Setting -> “about us” type content, the where, who and what with a sense of character development
    • Action -> A summary of the services, in language that describes the activities
    • Suspense -> A challenge to imagine how this could be benefit you, and a challenge to the visitor’s conviction
    • Resolution -> Testimonials that reflect happy endings, a list of references

    Michael points to the article on narrative voice and I remember the advice I’m always giving others: remove that cold, corporate tone by writing in the the first person. (It’s harder to write ridiculous happy talk in the first person because it sounds ridiculous even to numb marketing types.)

  • Introduction to Metadata

    Our understanding of the world is facilitated by our ability to associate things, to compare and contrast, to categorize, and to form abstract relationships. To shape information in ways that allow others to better understand, we deliberately describe the information around us to shape it, creating new forms of knowledge. When communicating with computers, we can do this using metadata.

    Metadata is simply a piece of information that describes other information. For example, let’s look at some text, a headline from nytimes.com:

    Bush Continues to Push Congress for Resolution on Iraq


    By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 12:30 PM ET


    President Bush today kept up pressure on Congress to approve action against Iraq amid new criticism from Democrats.


    • Video: Bush Speaks on Iraq Issues
    • C.I.A. and F.B.I. Defend Counterterrorism

    The data in this case is the headline and summary:


    Bush Continues to Push Congress for Resolution on Iraq


    President Bush today kept up pressure on Congress to approve action against Iraq amid new criticism from Democrats.

    The metadata is the surrounding information that helps us understand the context or to categorize the data:

    Published by: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS


    Publish time: 12:30 PM ET


    Related information:

    • Video: Bush Speaks on Iraq Issues
    • C.I.A. and F.B.I. Defend Counterterrorism

    There may also be other metadata that isn’t displayed but which helps the system display or organize the data:

    Desk: National


    Information Type: News


    Format: Column

    To allow readers to search or browse their news, the New York Times might collect one taxonomy of terms – a form of metadata – and display all these terms together. For example, the Desk taxonomy looks like this:

    International


    National


    Politics


    Business


    Technology


    Science


    Health


    Sports


    New York Region


    Education


    Weather


    Obituaries

    This collection is called a metadata schema, meaning a systematic combination of elements.

    Metadata can describe other things as well, such as people or places.

    <--


    There are several types of schemes that can be used when organizing metadata:


    [ insert chart ]


    adapted from “Levels of Control” from and “An Ontology Spectrum” from Deborah McGuiness


    –>

    Essentially, the benefits of these metadata schema are:


    • improved browsing and searching by making it easy for the users of a system to find information
    • improved communication among people by creating a common vocabulary
    • simpler maintenance by reducing chaotic use of language

    Here’s some basic definitions to help tell the different kinds of schema apart:


    • Synonym Ring: A grouping of similar words or phrases. Synonyms might be used in a search engine by locating relevant information when someone searches on a related term.


    • Glossary: a collection of terms and definitions within a particular domain. A glossary could be used to simply help people agree and understand a common terminology.


    • Taxonomy: An arrangement and naming of metadata, usually hierarchical. A taxonomy might be a list of category names.


    • Faceted Taxonomy: A taxonomy with attributes and attribute values. If News is a term than an attribute could be Country and an attribute value of Country could be France.


    • Thesaurus: A taxonomy that also includes terms that are associated and terms that are related. The term Newspaper is associated with the term Journal and related to the term Town Crier.


      • The above are often referred to as “controlled vocabularies”. If we try to go beyond formal vocabularies and formalize our knowledge of a subject this is known as “knowledge representation”.


    • Ontology: the specification of one’s conceptualization of a knowledge domain. Ontologies resemble faceted taxonomies but use richer semantic relationships among terms and attributes, as well as strict rules about how to specify terms and relationships.

    It might help to define some related terms:


    Controlled Vocabularies – a defined set of preferred terms. Types of controlled vocabularies include Synonym Rings,


    Authority Files, Taxonomies, Faceted Taxonomies, and Thesauri. Ontologies are not usually considered a form of controlled vocabulary but rather a form of knowledge representation.

    Attribute – an aspect of an object, such as the publisher name. Attributes are alternately called “facets” when applied to taxonomies, “slots” when applied to ontologies, or “fields” when applied to databases.

    Attribute Value – a value assigned to an attribute. For example the attribute “Publisher Name” can have a value of “New York Times”.

    {show examples of all these}

    A note on metatags: metadata and metatags are related, but are different things. Metatags are found within markup code (like HTML pages) to identify certain attributes of that information. Metadata goes *into* metatags, but metadata has many other uses as well.

  • A Question

    How will we create and access information in 10 years? In 20 years?

    How do you wish we would?

    Progress is so constant we rarely pause to acknowledge it. We have split the atom, put astronauts on the moon, and replaced unhealthy hearts in the living with healthy hearts from the dead. Computer technology leaves a record of faster, smaller, easier to use technology: We’ve come from mainframe computers the size of large rooms to microprocessors embedded in credit cards. From assembly language to Java. From command line interfaces to mouse-and-keyboard driven multimedia interfaces. From computers dialing each other at 1200 bits per second to constant communication at millions of bits per second.

    We have so much potential.

    With so much progress, it strikes me as odd that we devote so little time to planning for it. We have an understanding of what we need to do now when designing products (“make it usable”, “make it beautiful”, “increase brand equity”…). How helpful it would be to hold similar common understandings of what we should all have 10 years from now. This could then guide all our efforts towards our goals, rather than design products as a series of guesses about what should be next year.

    How will we create and access information in 10 years? How do you wish we would?

  • Article: The Semantic Website

    Get a pot of coffee or two in me and out pops another article, this time in Digital Web under the unwieldy title of Smarter Content Publishing, Building a semantic website to increase the efficiency and usability of publishing systems. Don’t bother reading it, I’ll sum it up for you:

    1. Manually marking up HTML is lame, computers should automatically do that for us
    2. The content management system trend is making publishing easier and less expensive (see Movable Type)
    3. CMS still has a lot of inefficiencies, requiring business users to think about web design instead of business
    4. Metadata to the rescue! Just keep layering the stuff until you’re talking business terms instead of design terms
    5. It’s hard, but that never kept us from using technology before
    6. It’s actually an application of the Semantic Web, but aren’t you glad I didn’t tell you that at the beginning?

    If you do bother to read it, hopefully you won’t agree with this guy from the Web Ontology Working Group who wrote in to tell me it was great. ‘Cause that doesn’t help me improve. I need some constructive feedback. Did you like the topic but thought the level was too hard or too easy? Do you want more examples? More theory? Too long, too short? Tell me.

  • Iconic Search

    James showed me this gorgeous visual search interface he and Designframe created for a company that makes ‘metal fabrics’ – sheets of flexible, woven metal designs. Aimed at architects, the results page is key too. First off, the color photos pop nicely on a black background. Second, instead of prominently showing the product that matches a query, it shows off a structure built with it, corresponding with the goals of the architect, not the goal of the manufacturer; the product is off to the side in a smaller way. It’s all about lusting after beautiful stuff, which architects like to do. It probably helps when the products are all shiny metal objects.

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