Eric Reiss - Editorial
An Information Architect by any Other Name
“
After a rousing start, the dot-bomb exploded and by 2002, there was
widespread distrust of any unusual business-card title from someone
involved in interactive communications.
Some of the leaders within our fledgling community subsequently
proclaimed they were no longer information architects. Rather, they became
self-styled "business analysts" and made a point of distancing themselves
from the IA community. Sadly, few of these provocateurs actually knew much
about business analysis and today most of them are again part of the IA
scene. This is good. We need these people - particularly if they have picked
up a little business savvy.
”
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Elise Conradi
to_be_classified
This paper examines the use of the postulational approach to facet analysis to manually induce a faceted classification ontology from a folksonomy. An in-depth study of faceted classification theory is used to form a methodology based on the postulational approach, which is then used to facet analyze a dataset consisting of over 107,000 instances of 1,275 unique tags representing 76 popular non- fiction history books collected from the LibraryThing folksonomy. Preliminary results of the facet analysis indicate the manual inducement of two faceted classification ontologies in the dataset: a completed ontology representing the domain of books and an incomplete ontology representing the domain of subjects within the domain of books. The grouping of tags into theoretically based facets and conceptual categories give new insight into how users describe information resources. Furthermore, the relationships discerned in the ontologies are user- generated relationships between tagged information items, representing a new form of knowledge. Practical implications of the results are discussed in terms of potential areas in which user-generated metadata can enhance faceted structures in information architecture.
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L. Downey & S. Banerjee
Building an Information Architecture Checklist
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.
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M. Frické
Classification, Facets, and Metaproperties
The paper argues that second order properties or metaproperties are essential for classification and navigation of information, for example for faceted classification and the navigation it generates. The paper observes that metaproperties, are not accommodated well within such standard schemes as Z39.19, description logics (DLs), and the formal ontologies OWL, BFO, and DOLCE.
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