Thursday, February 21 - Information Architecture
This course will help you further your knowledge of the science of organizing information via a series of practical, hands-on lessons and activities. Taught by Chiara Fox, the Senior Information Architect at Adaptive Path.
Who is this workshop for?
This workshop is for experienced information architects who are interested in learning more about the library science aspect of information architecture. Chiara will explain the relationships and concepts behind data organization, controlled vocabularies and thesauri, content modeling and metadata.
What will be covered?
This workshop covers:
- Patterns and relationships: Analyze content, features, and data within your system, whether it’s a website, intranet, or web application. Learn how to create a model of your content that illustrates how the different pieces relate to each other.
- Concepts of categorization: Learn the advantages and drawbacks of different categorization methods. How best can you use metadata and tagging? What exactly is the difference between a taxonomy, folksonomy, vocabulary, or thesaurus? We’ll look at examples of each.
- Controlling vocabularies: Once you have a way to organize your content, how do you describe it to support findability, search and browse, and facilitate reuse? Learn how to cut through the ambiguity of language, focusing word choices with the appropriate level of vocabulary control.
- Concepts in practice: We’ll spend the remainder of the day looking at real-life examples of metadata, categorization, and vocabulary control with emphasis on unusual implementations of approaches and Web 2.0 examples.
Bibliography and References
Information Architecture Resources
- ASIS&T Information Architecture Special Interest Group.
- Boxes and Arrows, an online magazine for UX and IA.
- IA Summit, annual IA conference held in the spring.
- Information Architecture Institute.
- Morville, Peter, Rosenfeld, Lou. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 3rd Edition O’Reilly Press, 2006.
Metadata
Controlled Vocabularies and Thesauri
- Aitchison, Jean. Thesaurus Construction and Use: A Practical Manual. Europa Publications, 2000.
- ANSI/NISO Z39.19 -2005. Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies, 2005.
- Leise, Fred, Fast, Karl, Steckel, Mike. “All About Facets & Controlled Vocabularies,” Boxes and Arrows, 2002.
- Roe, Sandra K., Thomas, Alan R. The Thesaurus: Review, Renaissance, and Revision. Haworth Information Press, 2004.
- Smith, Gene. “Taxonomy of Tagging Systems,” Atomiq, December 18, 2006.
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Supporting Documents
- Workshop Slides 19.5mb PDF


(5 votes, average: 3.8 out of 5)
February 22nd, 2008 at 7:47 am
[…] Dan and Chiara’s slides from yesterday’s Information Architecture workshop are now available. […]