British Columbia public web site launches. Information architecture done rapidly up on Vancouver Island with fellow IA/mentor Alex Wright. http://www.agwright.com

Link:
http://www.gov.bc.ca/

Apple showing us that good products and innovation are achievable, by delivering a potential solution to the music industry quagmire. Not sure about you but I'd buy that for a dollar, um I mean 99¢

At second glance this brings me back to an earlier post in regards to web design and structured information. The new Apple music service takes this new approach by offering the music listings and purchasing of songs straight from the standalone app-iTunes. No browsing clunky HTML/standard browser interfaces, etc. No waiting for page refreshes, etc. Just quick access to the information.

Link:
http://www.apple.com/music/store/

Good article over at Boxes and Arrows illustrating the many levels of IA. This is a somewhat detailed overview of how Information Architecture is used from the top-level (Navigation and tangible user interfaces) to the lower-level or backend (Controlled vocabularies, metadata structure, Content Management).

Illustrations give a conceptual overview of how a well-structured IA can be used "behind-the-scenes" to allow for dynamic content relationships. A solid IA including well-defined metadata (information describing information) and controlled vocabularies can be used to generate dynamic pages that illustrate related items or content. sounds like fun...

Link:
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/building_a_metadatabased_website.php

The Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture (AIFIA) has republished this article by Dr. Louise Spiteri from 1998. Don't be fooled by the title of this "simplified" explanation of facet analysis and classification. Clearly a difficult topic this is a "meaty" introduction to faceted classification and an excellent resource.

S. R. Ranganathan and the Classification Research Group (CRG). Ranganathan developed the theory of facet analysis because he was dissatisfied with the inability of traditional enumerative bibliographic classification systems to allow for the expression of compound subjects (Ranganathan 1962, 1967). Classification systems such as the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) and the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) attempt to enumerate topics expressed in published works. Such enumerative systems do not allow easily for the combination of terms from different parts of the classification schedules to express compound subjects. (from introduction)

Link:
http://aifia.org/pg/a_simplified_model_for_facet_analysis.php

This article came by way of SIG-IA mail list. Good description of Amazon's recommendations engine. Explains the difference between traditional collaborative filtering, cluster models, and Amazon's approach.

The key to item-to-item collaborative filtering's scalability and performance is that it creates the expensive similar-items table offline. The algorithm's online component—looking up similar items for the user's purchases and ratings—scales independently of the catalog size or the total number of customers; it is dependent only on how many titles the user has purchased or rated. Thus, the algorithm is fast even for extremely large data sets. Because the algorithm recommends highly correlated similar items, recommendation quality is excellent.10 Unlike traditional collaborative filtering, the algorithm also performs well with limited user data, producing high-quality recommendations based on as few as two or three items.

Link:
http://dsonline.computer.org/0301/d/w1lind.htm

I have published a *general* introductory article with specific approaches to user experience design and information architecture for government sites. The article touches on the broad process from the point of view of a Lead information architect and walks through some of the following:

- Organization and political issues
- Information architecture framework
- Metadata structure, and classification issues
- Search, Help and Indexes
- Content Management
- Section 508 compliance

Not long after my article went live at Digital-web I received a few emails with comments. In particular I should note that Anitra Pavka (accessibility specialist) has pointed out an omitted qualification on my part.

In the article I state:
"While not bound to the federal laws of section 508, state and provincial governments often require meeting level-A (Priority 1) checkpoints or higher as specified by the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative."

While this might be partially true Anitra notes, "That States that receive money from the Assistive Technology Act of 1998 (most, if not all, do) are required (legally) to comply with Section 508." So States that receive Federal funding through the ATAct are required to meet Section 508 guidelines.

Anitra's site is a great source for accessibility related information and resources.

Links:
http://www.resna.org/taproject/policy/initiatives/nidrrassur.html
http://www.anitrapavka.com
http://www.digital-web.com/features/feature_2003-01b.shtml

TRACING ROOTS OF CURRENT THEMES IN IA/UE

Popular and current themes within the information architecture and user experience fields.

Reductionism
Originally seen in Linked: The New Science of Networks
by Albert-László Barabási, May 2002

Peter Morville's recent (Dec 2002)article mentions: Our enemy is a dangerous meme known as reductionism. This devious adversary is spreading the notion that we can fully understand Web sites as a combination of simpler components, and that we can break the process of design into lots of quick steps and clearly defined deliverables.

Power Laws and Pareto's Principle (Bradford's Distribution)

Also mentioned in Barabási's "Linked" as well as by Marcia Bates as far back as 1998 or further? See her article: http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue7_7/bates/

Recent threads within the community:
http://interconnected.org/home/2002_12_01_archive.shtml#90024692
http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/archives/000336.html#000336

Nice re-design of the BBC homepage by Matt Jones.

Great use of "browsable" lists for indexing of the site. Site index also is robust, by subject, category or A-Z.

Links:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/categories/

Came to this by way of v-2 where Adam Greenfield mentions:

The page sports one of the coolest hacks I've ever seen in Web navigation: a simple, unobtrusive, but thoroughly useful intervention that deserves to be spread as far and as wide as possible.

Here's how it works: the background color of boxes containing links that you click frequently darkens a little every time you do so. Over time, those options that you use most often will stand out against the background: a thoroughly individualized map to your path through the space, left as a consequence of your own choices and with no further input required.

Amy Warner (previously of Argus) has provided another good source for taxonomy and classification information.

Taxonomies…thesauri…classification systems…synonym rings. We’ve heard all of these terms in the context of the Web. As Web sites expand, the task of organizing them has become increasingly problematic and complex.

3. Provide some basic guidelines and recommendations for creating controlled vocabularies and leveraging them effectively.

Link:
http://www.lexonomy.com/publications/aTaxonomyPrimer.html

Recently on Lou Rosenfeld's blog he mentiones the 80/20 rule, basicically focus design on the 20% of content that effects 80% of the audience.

http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/000122.html

He identifies these crucial areas:

-Main page
-Search interface
-Search results
-Browsing interface
-The "found document"

James Robertson of Step Two Designs offers good commentary on"Search":

I agree absolutely with your search engine comments. I've often found it bizzare how little effort is spent getting the search interface right. Most often, IT managers install the search engine "out of the box" and leave it at that.

This links to his (James') excellent research on designing the search interface:

http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/search/index.html

PDF
also on the site.

... and Peter Morville will be speaking at a FREE event in Berkeley on Nov. 1, Friday 7-9pm.

Links:
http://www.baychi.org/

http://www.baychi.org/calendar/20021101/

More on the semantic web and distributed IA and content:

"XFML is an open XML format for publishing and connecting faceted metadata between Web sites. ... XFML allows for easy creation of advanced, automatically generated navigation for your Web site. You can even automatically generate links to related topics on other Web sites. It also allows for merging of metadata between different Web sites."

Links:
http://www.digital-web.com/columns/ianythinggoes/ianythinggoes_2002-09.shtml

Original entry:
http://www.uedesignlab.com/uelog/archives/000057.html#000057

Good resource for search related issues, ranging from search technology to interface and IA solutions for search.

Link:
http://www.searchtools.com/index.html

...is an excellent resource for content management systems.

Link:
http://www.cmswatch.com/

Nice article from C. Wodtke.

Link:
http://www.digital-web.com/tutorials/tutorial_2002-08.shtml

Link:
http://www.mantex.co.uk/reviews/bib-01.htm

Information retrieval (IR) is about matching human information needs to data objects. Rich structural markup of documents will enable a next generation of IR systems to better meet the information needs of people because the markup will help to disambiguate the language used for the documents (Newby, 2000). Metadata will further enhance the capabilities of IR systems by providing high quality descriptions of content.

Information space is defined as the set of concepts and relations among held by an information system. This is as compared to cognitive space, which is the set of concepts and relations among them held by a human (see Newby, 2001 for further detail). For IR, it has been argued that a long-term goal is for IR systems to act as extensions to human memory (also known as, exosomatic memory systems; introduced in Brookes, 1980). Were such systems to exist, finding information would be the same as remembering information already known. For this long-term goal to be realized, information spaces of IR systems would need to be tightly coupled to the cognitive spaces of their individual users.

Link:
http://informationr.net/ir/7-4/paper137.html
Another use of *information spaces*. Note, I have seen more use of the term, which makes me feel more comfortable about the focus of my site.

Good article at Boxes and Arrows from Chris Farnum on prototyping for user experience. He presents varying levels of fidelity from high - low and the reasons or appropriate uses for each.

Link:
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/002870.php

Definition: The Semantic Web is the abstract representation of data on the World Wide Web, based on the RDF standards and other standards to be defined. It is being developed by the W3C, in collaboration with a large number of researchers and industrial partners.

"The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation." -- Tim Berners-Lee

Links:
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?articleID=00048144-10D2-1C70-84A9809EC588EF21&catID=2

As mentioned in previous entry on faceted classification, it seems that momentum is building, possibly making this type of classification an industry standard in the not too distant future.

An excellent flash demo clearly illustrates the concept.

Link:
http://endeca.com/demos/demo_text.html

Lou Rosenfeld sumarizes Marcia Bates' article on the need for information retrieval on the web. He also cites an excellent example of faceted navigation at Epicurious.com.

Links:
http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/000100.html

http://eat.epicurious.com/recipes/browse_home/index.ssf?/recipes/browse_home/index.html

This tutorial was found at IAslash.org.

Link:
http://www.mojofat.com/tutorial/index.html

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.

Link:
http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/people/dlm/papers/ontologies-come-of-age-mit-press-(with-citation).htm

www.verizon.com

The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.

Link:
http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html

Facets, and controlled vocabularies at the Getty research institute.

Link:
http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabulary/aat/about.html#struct

From Jesse James Garrett, the *man*

All the talk of left vs. right and no mention of the comprehensive text and visual glossary of car/audi related terms.

http://www.uiweb.com/other/chiweb.htm

Good historical article at Boxes and Arrows.

Bush has been hailed as the conceptual creator of “hypertext,” laying out the notion of the modern link 50 years before the web became a public phenomenon.

Found this after designing my uedesignlab home page.

1. Information Spaces. McKnight (2000, p. 730) uses information space to mean "objects (real or virtual) to which the individual turns to acquire information”. Information spaces will increasingly be made up of heterogeneous formats. Dillon (2002) calls this the multimedia mix-and-match. The challenge is the “smooth blending of multimedia” in interfaces (ibid., p. 469). How can information displays in digital libraries enable users to extract meanings by mixing multimedia (sound, graphics, video, text, all seamlessly linked) for an interactive experience? Furthermore, new technologies will result in “wholly new forms”, possibly new genres of information that will only exist digitally; genres may also be consciously designed. In fact Winograd (1996) argues for this. Tools are needed to support the transformation and derivations of new genres from underlying information units by readers of documents and the users of digital libaries. The first challenge is to build information spaces that are heterogeneous and include support tools for shaping them.

http://webreview.com/1999/07_09/strategists/07_09_99_3.shtml

Controlled vocabulary resources, http://www.asindexing.org/site/