http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/Information-Design A listing of the most recently indexed works about Articles and Information Design in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/Information-Design http://tc.eserver.org/35772.html http://tc.eserver.org/35772.html Given the pressures on firms to provide increased value at lower costs, it’s imperative that they find ways to reduce the costs of creating and managing documents and increase their value to clients and personnel. Microsoft SharePoint provides a range of features to make your firm’s documents “smarter,” from capturing rich metadata to automating workflows to intelligent search. As applied, these features can transform passive documents into active, reusable resources. In this article I’ll describe some of the ways that SharePoint can reduce the effort to create, manage and retrieve documents and increase their value, as smart documents, to both your firm and its clients. http://tc.eserver.org/35773.html http://tc.eserver.org/35773.html The SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata feature has been my favourite topic since coming back from the SharePoint conference. I get excited about this kind of thing because metadata is a big part of all of the software we build. But some people are probably saying "Why should we get so excited about new metadata features in SharePoint? The new UI and improved capacity are really the neat things about SharePoint 2010." http://tc.eserver.org/35706.html http://tc.eserver.org/35706.html For a database administrator, DBM (database management) tools make tasks related to maintaining relational databases efficient and fast. Prior to the popularity of these tools, most DBA’s had to use the command line to create, edit, and delete databases. In this article, we present to you the top five most popular/most voted for database management tools. http://tc.eserver.org/35713.html http://tc.eserver.org/35713.html I did an experiment on Friday that taught me an important lesson: When it comes to handling XML structures, I know pretty much jack. This may be a fatal admission for a technical communicator, but it’s an honest one. http://tc.eserver.org/35677.html http://tc.eserver.org/35677.html The shift in information development from a narrative to a modular writing style reflects the established shift towards modularization of source code. What can information developers learn from software developers? What are the challenges and benefits of the modular approach? http://tc.eserver.org/35618.html http://tc.eserver.org/35618.html By reading this short tutorial, you'll get acquainted with the DITA 1.1 markup and after that, you'll be able to author your first DITA document right away. This short tutorial will not discuss the DITA ``philosophy'' or the advantages of the DITA vocabulary over other XML vocabularies (e.g. DocBook). http://tc.eserver.org/35579.html http://tc.eserver.org/35579.html Quick Tables are a quick and easy way to insert a pre-formatted table. However, the default tables are probably not what you want, so you need to know how to add your own. http://tc.eserver.org/35550.html http://tc.eserver.org/35550.html Bad buildings and bad web sites share similar architectural roots. First, many architects don’t inhabit the structures they design. They don’t fully understand the needs of their customers, and they’re not around to suffer the long-term consequences of poor decisions. Second, creating structures to stand the test of time is really difficult. http://tc.eserver.org/35551.html http://tc.eserver.org/35551.html Lo sviluppo di un’architettura dell’informazione prevede parecchie sfide, ma una biblioteca è un ambiente relativamente ben definito e sono disponibili molte esperienze e sapere collettivo da cui attingere. I siti web, d’altro canto, presentano un serie di nuove sfide. http://tc.eserver.org/35552.html http://tc.eserver.org/35552.html The article presents a point of view about analyzing and designing the user experience within pervasive networks made of distributed services and applications, where the user is the primary actor who freely and opportunistically connects and activates the system components following an activity-driven process. A digital content case study is used to outline the main characteristics of this scenario and to introduce a tool for user experience modelling and designing. From the application of this model are proposed some considerations about how the design process could change to support this vision. http://tc.eserver.org/35553.html http://tc.eserver.org/35553.html Information architecture (IA) and document architecture (DA) provide two, partly overlapping, perspectives on the creation of document structures. This article suggests how the architecture of a document can be analysed from these two perspectives. Literature on IA and DA has been examined in order to identify central ideas that are of relevance for analysing the architectures of digital documents. The article contains an overview of how IA and DA have been used and defined. The article shows how a model for analysing documents as sociotechnical artefacts can fruitfully draw on parts of the theoretical and practical complexes of IA and DA. The aspects that are identified as particularly important from IA are organisation systems, navigation, and labelling. From DA, logical structures, layout structures, content structures, and file structures are all applicable aspects. It is discussed how these various aspects may be interpreted in order to support an analysis of the organising principles of documents. http://tc.eserver.org/35555.html http://tc.eserver.org/35555.html Uncertainty, in general, is a fundamental aspect of human activity and underlies much of our decision making. The notion of uncertainty in information seeking, in particular, dates back to Shannon and Weaver (1949) and since then has been investigated in many forms. Kulthau's (1993) work on information uncertainty is perhaps the most extensive. Through two specific examples, this article proposes uncertainty as a unifying heuristic in information architecture. Measurements of uncertainty can serve a diagnostic function in both the design and evaluation of information technologies and user interfaces. http://tc.eserver.org/35556.html http://tc.eserver.org/35556.html This essay re-frames Information Architecture as designing context in the digital layer, contending that IA has always been less about organizing information than about designing architecture for a new kind of contextual space. It explores how a global network of user-created hyperlinks has changed how we experience context, and how IA practice emerged to contend with this change. In addition, the essay proposes that IA study and practice develop tools and methods that improve our understanding and methods for solving the increasingly complex design challenges brought about by this new contextual reality. http://tc.eserver.org/35448.html http://tc.eserver.org/35448.html With the advent of digital cameras, photographs are now stored on fixed and removable digital storage media (possibly kept in shoe boxes again!). But again, the solutions we see coming from the industry today mostly emphasize photo capture and storage, but offer little in terms of building photo libraries. Today’s digital cameras will record the time, date and exposure data; they might even permit a short audio comment to be recorded. However there is little if any software that will adequately utilize this data to catalog and search for images. http://tc.eserver.org/35430.html http://tc.eserver.org/35430.html This study describes what SDI Global Solutions did to help a small software company (hereafter referred to as SSC) to provide them with a basic infrastructure to support their information needs. We have broken up this study into sections titled, Company Description, Business Requirement, Starting State, Project Scope, Implementation, and Ending State. The purpose of the study is to provide guidance for similar projects to ensure the same or greater success. http://tc.eserver.org/35433.html http://tc.eserver.org/35433.html DITA is useful for helping writers create small units of organized information that can be used in multiple contexts. Of course, the reader's problem then becomes locating the information they want in a quick, reasonable timeframe. Although DITA provides enough metadata to simplify searching, or even to present information the reader needs based on a profile, there are some media that cannot make use of those facilities. To bridge that gap, you can use the tried and true index. http://tc.eserver.org/35411.html http://tc.eserver.org/35411.html At the recent workshop co-organized by W3C and XBRL International on improving access to financial data on the web, a few key issues related to the semantic web took center stage. The goal of the workshop was to identify opportunities and challenges for interactive access to financial data expressed in XBRL and related languages, and the broader opportunities for semantic technologies. http://tc.eserver.org/35371.html http://tc.eserver.org/35371.html In technical writing, synonyms and variants should be used judiciously and often avoided altogether. The use of one term consistently to express a given concept is preferred so that communication is clear and so that translation costs are minimized. For this reason, when synonyms and variants do exist in popular usage, it is common practice in commercial environments to choose one of the terms as the “preferred term.” This indicator of preferred usage needs to be documented in glossaries. Due to the limitations of markup languages for creating glossaries, usually the so-called preferred term is identified simply by making it the headword in a glossary entry and providing a definition in this glossary entry. http://tc.eserver.org/35319.html http://tc.eserver.org/35319.html What happens when, one day, you’re asked into the boss’s office and they drop “the web site” and “information architecture” into your lap? Regardless of your experience, where do you begin? Donna says your first question should be, “Why do we bother to have a web site in the first place?” “What’s its purpose?” She says if you don’t get this out of the way first, you’ll run up against it when you’re further along the trail and it won’t be easy to deal with. http://tc.eserver.org/35320.html http://tc.eserver.org/35320.html To present content on the web in the amount that most people want: think “topic,” not “book”; break large documents into topics and subtopics. http://tc.eserver.org/35321.html http://tc.eserver.org/35321.html One page or separate pages? When faced with that decision, ask yourself these questions: How much do people want in one visit? How connected is the information? Am I overloading my site visitors? How long is the web page? What’s the download time? Will people want to print? How much will they want to print? http://tc.eserver.org/35330.html http://tc.eserver.org/35330.html Information design has traditionally focused on usability as measured by functionality and efficiency in the execution of user tasks. Newer approaches to experience design and new communication technologies such as the so-called Web 2.0 platform and its Ajax engine emphasize total user engagement with the technology and richer collaborations among users. These developments complicate traditional notions of agency by highlighting the role of technology as mediator between and among users. A project in Tech-Mediated Communication at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, funded by the Society for Technical Communication, illustrates how these developments impact the development of novel and creative information resources, with several experiments in cross-cultural, community-oriented, and educational systems design. This work also emphasizes the need to develop research agendas and programmatic initiatives that support interdisciplinary collaborative design activities and thus help technical communicators to meet their collective responsibility to influence and shape the mediating technologies of the future by creating more engaging and more collaborative total user experiences. http://tc.eserver.org/35310.html http://tc.eserver.org/35310.html Intelligent content is content which is not limited to one purpose, technology or output. It’s content that is structurally rich and semantically aware, and is therefore discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable. It’s content that helps you and your customers get the job done, often automatically. http://tc.eserver.org/35297.html http://tc.eserver.org/35297.html A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online. I think that professional writers and technical writers should consider a move towards this role. We already search for and find the best content, sift through loads of content, discard poor content, and publish the most worthy content whenever a software release goes out. This description also sounds like something a content strategist would do as part of their analysis of the content. http://tc.eserver.org/35298.html http://tc.eserver.org/35298.html A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online. The most important component of this job is the word "continually." In the real time world of the Internet, this is critical. In an attempt to offer more of a vision for someone who might fill this role, here is my crack at a short manifesto for someone who might take on this job. http://tc.eserver.org/35246.html http://tc.eserver.org/35246.html Generation Y are the first generation to fully put the process of ‘prosumption’ into practice. Individuals are proactively seeking to generate and share creative outputs as a result of their online activities, and this produces a set of fundamental questions for business librarians, information management specialists and consultants: does our profession adhere to a logic of service-delivery, which is rapidly becoming obsolete in the context of service-innovation. Suggestions for how information specialists (called librarian 2.0 in this article) can participate in the creation of value for users are offered. http://tc.eserver.org/35247.html http://tc.eserver.org/35247.html This article gives a detailed encyclopedic overview of the many areas and concepts that fall within the domain of information ethics. Thus, it offers brief synoptic remarks on, for example, privacy and peer review, rather than in-depth discussions of these topics, many of which have generated thousands of studies, articles, and monographic treatments. http://tc.eserver.org/35251.html http://tc.eserver.org/35251.html In today’s competitive environment, organizations succeed or fail based on how well they manage information. To address this reality, organizations spend millions, if not billions, on securing their information advantages. New information technologies and methodologies are adopted, while old ones are dismantled or upgraded. To win, the information manager must constantly seek to outperform his or her competition. In this article the author asks how he or she does it? Perhaps by acquiring the best new technologies, hiring the most intelligent information professionals, and continuously keeping a watchful eye on the future. But, he asks, does having the best information, the best information systems, and the best information professionals, really pay off? Is there victory in sight? Or, is this just a continuous game with no clear winners? http://tc.eserver.org/35252.html http://tc.eserver.org/35252.html In this article, the author considers the important trends that are reshaping the way information and knowledge workers consume and use information. She looks at the way in which the first generation of digital natives are approaching work activities in a different way from earlier generations, and exploiting the advances in technology across the spectrum to deal with the explosion in the volume of available information. She focuses on the way in which the combination of these factors emphasize the need for good quality, timely and relevant information, and how they affect the role of the information professional. http://tc.eserver.org/35253.html http://tc.eserver.org/35253.html The article considers the concept of marketing in the light of library and information services and mentions the necessity of marketing techniques in library and information centres. It outlines the principles of information products/services marketing and discusses the key steps of marketing for library and information centres. The article indicates the methods of applying marketing techniques to library and information centres and marketing difficulties to library and information services in developing countries are also discussed, with particular reference to those in Bangladesh. http://tc.eserver.org/35257.html http://tc.eserver.org/35257.html Market Data and Business information have traditionally been two disciplines that have been very separate with no overlap. However, changes in content and delivery now mean that the two professions are much closer than previously and many of the issues and content sets are now common to both. Looking at some of the issues involved we can see how each side can benefit from the experience of the other. http://tc.eserver.org/35228.html http://tc.eserver.org/35228.html When you’re knee-deep in wireframes or CSS it’s all too easy to end up in a bubble of IxD books and blogs. One option is to take inspiration from vintage art and nature, but what about what other smart people are doing in their respective disciplines? In other words, why not steal from them? Here are my picks of a few other fields with ideas worth appropriating, or at least glancing at. http://tc.eserver.org/35193.html http://tc.eserver.org/35193.html Dealing with information overload can be a huge stressor in life. Not only trying to keep up with the constant deluge of information that comes at you daily, but also managing that information in an organized way — so that you can find and implement it — can put your sanity in question. In this podcast, I talk with Ricardo Amigo, a translator in Costa Rica, about different ways to manage information overload. http://tc.eserver.org/35165.html http://tc.eserver.org/35165.html In his article in this issue, Peter-Paul Koch proposes adding custom attributes to form elements to allow triggers for specialized behaviors. The W3C validator won’t validate a document with these attributes, as they aren’t part of the XHTML specification. This article will show you how to create a custom DTD that will add those custom attributes, and will show you how to validate documents that use those new attributes. http://tc.eserver.org/35166.html http://tc.eserver.org/35166.html The reason that we use XML instead of a specific application is that XML is not just a pretty face, living in isolation from the rest of the computing world. XML is more than a rulebook for generating custom markup languages. It is part of a family of technologies, which, working together, make your XML-based documents very useful indeed. To demonstrate what I mean, I decided to create a new XML-based markup language from scratch, and show what you can do with a document written in that language, using off-the-shelf tools. http://tc.eserver.org/35122.html http://tc.eserver.org/35122.html Although managing costs is important anytime, it is especially important in today's economic reality where budgets are shrinking drastically. Getting your money's worth as well as what you need to support your data should be a core factor of any data project. The two biggest cost factors are the type of conversion work you need done and how much of it you'll need. This article focuses on how your goals for your project relate to the output format you choose, and how that format impacts costs. While some outputs, like XML, provide higher capabilities, they also cost more to create. http://tc.eserver.org/35123.html http://tc.eserver.org/35123.html While I'm a big fan of XML for many purposes, it's a misconception that it's the single best solution in every scenario, and it's worthwhile to consider the alternatives in situations where the benefits of XML are not necessary. In this article, I discuss alternatives to XML, SGML, and HTML that might be suitable when budgets are more limited. While XML is perfect for highly coded information, other options can work well for many kinds of information. Markup languages are at the high end of the cost spectrum, so if you don't need the benefits they provide, you certainly should consider the alternatives discussed below. http://tc.eserver.org/35101.html http://tc.eserver.org/35101.html While ubiquitous computing remains an unpleasant mouthful of techno-babble to most people who know the term, and everyware is still an essentially unknown idea, the visibility of augmented reality has surged in the last twelve months. http://tc.eserver.org/35107.html http://tc.eserver.org/35107.html The first major Web trend we're looking at is Structured Data. In prior presentations, this has sometimes been referred to under the umbrella term of 'Semantic Web'. However the way 2009 has panned out so far, it's become clear that this trend is much more than the Semantic Web. In this post, we'll analyze the developments in Structured Data this year and provide you with 3 product examples: OpenCalais, Google, and Wolfram Alpha. http://tc.eserver.org/35081.html http://tc.eserver.org/35081.html The DITA OpenToolkit (DITA OT) provides a way to produce multiple outputs, including Portable Document Format (PDF) files; however, the technology for creating PDF files is limited, and modifying the formatting is challenging. This paper explains the alternatives and trade-offs for each method and helps demystify the decision process. http://tc.eserver.org/35057.html http://tc.eserver.org/35057.html XML considers four characters to be whitespace: the carriage return, the linefeed, the tab, and the spacebar space. Microsoft operating systems put both a carriage return and a linefeed at the end of each line of a text file, and people usually refer to the combination as the "carriage return". XSLT stylesheet developers often get frustrated over the whitespace that shows up in their result documents -- sometimes there's more than they wanted, sometimes there's less, and sometimes it's in the wrong place. Over the next few columns, we'll discuss how XML and XSLT treat whitespace to gain a better understanding of what can happen, and we'll look at some techniques for controlling how an XSLT processor adds whitespace to the result document. http://tc.eserver.org/35058.html http://tc.eserver.org/35058.html Since the early days of XSLT, many have asked whether it was possible to automate the creation of XSLT stylesheets. The general idea of filling out a form or dragging some icons around, then clicking a button and seeing a productive stylesheet generated from your input has always appealed to people. However, the problem of generating working XSLT syntax from the result of someone clicking on pull-down menus and radio buttons has not attracted many takers. http://tc.eserver.org/35059.html http://tc.eserver.org/35059.html The two most well-known XSLT processors are probably the Apache project's Xalan (available in both a Java and C++ version) and the Java-based Saxon, which was written by XSLT 2.0 specification editor Michael Kay. If those are the only two XSLT processors you currently use, it's worth checking out Daniel Veillard's libxslt. http://tc.eserver.org/35060.html http://tc.eserver.org/35060.html In a recent weblog post, XML.com's "Python and XML" columnist Uche Ogbuji provided a nice collection of links to discussions about the push vs. pull styles of XSLT stylesheet development. What do we mean by "push" and "pull"? As a short example of each, let's look at two approaches to converting the following DocBook document to XHTML. http://tc.eserver.org/35061.html http://tc.eserver.org/35061.html XPath 1.0 (and hence your XSLT style sheets) considers two elements to be equal if their string values are the same. The string value is essentially all of the PCDATA between the element's start and end tags, even if the element has descendant elements. For example, an XSLT processor considers the w and z elements in the following to be equal, because they both have a string value of "abcdefghi". http://tc.eserver.org/35062.html http://tc.eserver.org/35062.html Covers XPath's new ability to do some things that every real programming language can do: conditional statements and iteration, or, as they're more colloquially known, "if" statements and "for" loops. We'll also look at a useful related technique for checking whether certain conditions do or don't exist in a set of nodes. http://tc.eserver.org/35063.html http://tc.eserver.org/35063.html Learn about the concept of XML whitespace, and gets tips for avoiding problems associated with it. http://tc.eserver.org/35064.html http://tc.eserver.org/35064.html With XSLT support fast becoming a commonly available component in the browser, web developers can now leverage transformations to manipulate large amounts of data in the browser at speeds acceptable for more advanced user interfaces. Once Safari gets its act together, I see more and more UI-specific data processing being moved off of the server into the browser. This article outlines the process involved in transforming the del.icio.us user API XML document into an HTML fragment. http://tc.eserver.org/35065.html http://tc.eserver.org/35065.html RSS is a hot topic these days, as it provides an easy way to stream data online. This article, the first of a four-part series on developing VoiceXML applications, shows you how to develop a voice-enabled RSS reader. The input to the application is RSS data, and the output is VoiceXML that can be read and spoken by your favorite compatible voice application. http://tc.eserver.org/35066.html http://tc.eserver.org/35066.html The value of XQuery is not in its role as an alternative syntax to XSLT 2.0 for manipulating XML; it's in the implementations, which let you quickly retrieve, sort, and manipulate specific subsets of XML from collections that can measure in the terabytes. The ability to store large, indexed collections of data that don't fit neatly into normalized relational tables will create possibilities for all kinds of new applications, both inside and outside of the publishing world. http://tc.eserver.org/35067.html http://tc.eserver.org/35067.html Gets you to the point where you could start exploring those features with a reasonably large collection of your own data. Without spending any money, you can check them all out and discover the advantages to having large amounts of your XML stored in a database where you (or an application!) can use a W3C standard language to quickly retrieve what you want from that database. http://tc.eserver.org/35068.html http://tc.eserver.org/35068.html XQuery is to XML what SQL is to database tables. XQuery was designed to query XML data. http://tc.eserver.org/35048.html http://tc.eserver.org/35048.html Rather than exporting a whole document out of Acrobat, I'll focus on a table within a PDF page. Suppose you'd like to have this table's data in a spreadsheet so you can manipulate it. There's no need to retype the data into Excel. All you need to do is use Acrobat's Selection tool to highlight the content you wish to export. http://tc.eserver.org/35030.html http://tc.eserver.org/35030.html Usually, the one thing missing from the planning of a WCM-driven web site is what's most likely to shoot the implementation in the foot: the functional design of the CMS back-end. The form and function of how the CMS will work, look and feel for the end-user of the system, not the visitor to the web site, is too often overlooked. This is odd: isn't the rationale for getting a CMS in the first place usually based on some kind of ROI in efficiency in actually producing the content and sites? http://tc.eserver.org/35033.html http://tc.eserver.org/35033.html Web Managers must think globally (information) and act locally (Web) all the while trying to widen your universe and build the internal business relationships which will allow your organization to manage its information more holistically now or in the future. http://tc.eserver.org/35012.html http://tc.eserver.org/35012.html One of DITA’s most attractive features is its support for incremental adoption: you can adopt DITA quickly and easily using a subset of its capabilities, and then add investment over time as your content strategy evolves and expands. However, this incremental continuum has also resulted in confusion, as communities at different stages of adoption claim radically different numbers for cost of migration and return on investment. The DITA Maturity Model addresses this confusion by dividing DITA adoption into six levels, each with its own required investment and associated return on investment. You can assess your own capabilities and goals relative to the model and choose the appropriate initial adoption level for your needs and schedule. http://tc.eserver.org/35013.html http://tc.eserver.org/35013.html How a multi-national, regulated medical device company planned its migration to a DITA CMS by identifying stakeholders and defining personas, establishing a high-level process and system requirements, developing a content model, and figuring out what to do with legacy documents. http://tc.eserver.org/35014.html http://tc.eserver.org/35014.html Focuses on an overall process identification methodology and its eight phases, and documents both the technical and business processes undertaken to successfully launch the new CMS/TMS system, called GEM (Globalization and English Management System). Includes what CaridianBCT learned from previous efforts and describes the various approaches and pilot phase that were adopted to support the new GEM system in future efforts. http://tc.eserver.org/35016.html http://tc.eserver.org/35016.html The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) provides maps for assembling topics into deliverables. By specializing the map elements, you can define a formal information architecture for your deliverables. This architecture provides guidance to authors on how to organize topics and lets processes recognize your organizing principles, resulting in a consistent, clear experience for your users. http://tc.eserver.org/35020.html http://tc.eserver.org/35020.html In this article we will introduce the concept of WS-Management and Common Information Model (CIM). By exploring the SOAP message with multiple examples, we will learn how to transfer CIM operations through WS-Management SOAP messages. http://tc.eserver.org/35021.html http://tc.eserver.org/35021.html Google Web Toolkit (GWT) applications, apart from connecting to servlets in time-honored Java fashion, can also use PHP Web services to send and receive data in XML. You'll explore methods to generate XML documents and process them, both in the Java language and in PHP. http://tc.eserver.org/34994.html http://tc.eserver.org/34994.html This article explores the social meaning of locale in mobile communication research and introduces an approach of user localization to study technology integration. It investigates how locale forms an essential role in mobile communication in the way that practice, agency, and identities are articulated into a user localization process of incorporating technology into user's everyday life. It argues that the use of mobile communication technology is both a complex and dynamic interaction with its surrounding social, cultural, technological, and economic conditions, and an articulation work of self and locale. http://tc.eserver.org/34940.html http://tc.eserver.org/34940.html Evolving and improving technology can improve health and healthcare in a myriad of ways. Equipment that is designed with the user, task, and environment in mind will reduce errors and improve outcomes. New designs make it possible for patients to do things for themselves that previously only doctors could. http://tc.eserver.org/34960.html http://tc.eserver.org/34960.html Critical care nurses' work is rich in informative interactions. Although there have been post-hoc self report studies of nurses' information seeking, there have been no observational studies of the patterns of their on-duty information behavior. This paper seeks to address this issue. http://tc.eserver.org/34961.html http://tc.eserver.org/34961.html This paper seeks to understand how users know when to stop searching for more information when the information space is so saturated that there is no certainty that the relevant information has been identified. http://tc.eserver.org/34962.html http://tc.eserver.org/34962.html This study seeks to apply ecological psychology's concept of "affordance" to graduate students' information behavior in the academic library, and to explore the extent to which the affordances experienced by graduate students differed from the affordances librarians were attempting to provide. http://tc.eserver.org/34963.html http://tc.eserver.org/34963.html This article aims to examine a particular sub-set of human information behavior that has been largely overlooked in the library and information science (LIS) literature; how people are socialized to create and use information. http://tc.eserver.org/34967.html http://tc.eserver.org/34967.html The purpose of this paper is to report on a research designed to find out how people in Scotland access and use online health information. http://tc.eserver.org/34903.html http://tc.eserver.org/34903.html ウェブサイトは、その構造とナビゲーションシステムとが互いに支え合っていなければならない。検索システムとも結びついていなければならない。サブサイトに至るまで一体化していなければならない。複雑で、一貫性が無く、選択肢が隠れていて、UIが扱いにくければ、ユーザーは必要なものを見つけられない。 http://tc.eserver.org/34904.html http://tc.eserver.org/34904.html タスク成功率は、2004 年のユーザビリティ統計と比べると大きく上昇した。しかしそれにもかかわらず、ユーザがタスクを完遂できないケースがあり、その原因の大半は情報アーキテクチャ(IA)の出来の悪さにある。 http://tc.eserver.org/34907.html http://tc.eserver.org/34907.html オンラインコンテンツは、文脈とは無関係にユーザーの目にとまることが多い。本来想定された目的とは違う目的で読まれることもよくある。そうした目的を全部予測することはできないが、テキストのさまざまな利用を考慮することはできる。 http://tc.eserver.org/34908.html http://tc.eserver.org/34908.html 大きな二次元のドロップダウンパネルは、ナビゲーションの選択肢をグループ化することでスクロールの必要性を無くし、タイポグラフィやアイコン、ツールチップを使うことで、ユーザの選択できる内容をわかりやすく提示してくれる。 http://tc.eserver.org/34739.html http://tc.eserver.org/34739.html Many web editors spend a lot of their time writing news stories for the company web site. However, traffic analysis frequently reveals that this content is not very popular - and that users may in fact miss the key content they come to find (product data, addresses etc.) because it's practically drowning in news stories. http://tc.eserver.org/34740.html http://tc.eserver.org/34740.html Most intranets are not all that different from each other - the same content subjects tend to apply to most companies and organizations. Content-Strategy has developed a universal intranet content chart that you can use directly - or modify - for free. http://tc.eserver.org/34718.html http://tc.eserver.org/34718.html Inline links and citations can be disruptive to the flow of information. Try to delete them because a topic is a discrete unit of information that is meaningful when it is displayed alone. http://tc.eserver.org/34719.html http://tc.eserver.org/34719.html Overview of best practices for using ditamaps and relationship tables to manage linking. http://tc.eserver.org/34720.html http://tc.eserver.org/34720.html While topic relationships can be stored in the topics themselves, as products evolve and user interfaces change, a topic that was required for release 1.0 of a product may no longer be needed in release 2.3. If related topics are maintained at the topic level, removing a topic that is no longer part of the system may involve modifying the related topics of a dozen different DITA files. http://tc.eserver.org/34721.html http://tc.eserver.org/34721.html Because keyref is so important and because it also has inherent, unavoidable complexity, I will be posting short examples of how keyref can be used to solve specific business problems. This is the first in an occasional series of such examples. This example shows one particular application of the keyref feature to a real-world problem faced by one of Really Strategies' clients. http://tc.eserver.org/34715.html http://tc.eserver.org/34715.html Technical Communication continues to change as we find new ways to meet the needs of our audiences. I have attended several conferences recently and discussed several of the latest trends with other technical communicators. This article provides a quick list of several of these trends and ideas. http://tc.eserver.org/34705.html http://tc.eserver.org/34705.html The people who own the creation, collection, and distribution of content may not be the same people in the very near future. I also believe technical communication is part of information architecture and user experience design. While the technical communication community, specifically many STC members, also work in usability or information design, the culture of the user has changed faster than the culture within the tech comm community. http://tc.eserver.org/34691.html http://tc.eserver.org/34691.html Semantic technology can be as heavy and stifling for any audience as stem-cell research can be to high-school students. But Carla Thompson of Guidewire did a terrific job of coming up with discussion topics and moderating the panel. Everyone survived the ordeal without any sign of dozing. http://tc.eserver.org/34678.html http://tc.eserver.org/34678.html “Content types” are among the least understood, and yet most potent, aspects of user experience and web design. Most people encounter them for the first time when implementing a grand-scale content management system (CMS) because you have to define content types before building templates for each kind of content you’re going to publish. Because they associate content types so closely with CMS, some make the mistake of equating content strategy with content management. They’re not the same thing, though they are certainly related. Your content strategy specifies the content types that will then be modeled for your CMS. http://tc.eserver.org/34664.html http://tc.eserver.org/34664.html The web is designed to be consumed by humans, and much of the rich, useful information our websites contain, is inaccessible to machines. People can cope with all sorts of variations in layout, spelling, capitalization, color, position, and so on, and still absorb the intended meaning from the page. Machines, on the other hand, need some help. A new kind of web—a semantic web—would be made up of information marked up in such a way that software can also easily understand it. Before considering how we might achieve such a web, let’s look at what we might be able to do with it. http://tc.eserver.org/34665.html http://tc.eserver.org/34665.html Web databases do much more than passively store information. Part of their power comes from indexing records efficiently. An index serves as a map, identifying the precise location of a small piece of data in a much larger pile. For example, when I search for “web development,” Google identifies two hundred million results and displays the first ten—in a quarter of a second. But Google isn’t loading every one of those pages and scanning their contents when I perform my search: they’ve analyzed the pages ahead of time and matched my search terms against an index that only references the original content. http://tc.eserver.org/34639.html http://tc.eserver.org/34639.html Dan Roam explains that drawing pictures can help you solve problems. He says the first rule is to “collect everything possible up front.” After collecting all your information, you then “lay it all out where you can look at it.” By laying out all the information, you can grasp the whole of it, make connections between various parts, see the important sections, and recognize patterns. http://tc.eserver.org/34576.html http://tc.eserver.org/34576.html There are two camps in technical documentation. There’s the “quick web” folks who connect easily and author easily, and then there’s the “structured quality” camp that requires more thoughtful testing and time spent on task analysis and information architecture. http://tc.eserver.org/34580.html http://tc.eserver.org/34580.html Why XML documents aren’t a good fit for relational databases, how university professors are creating custom text books for students, and find links to several innovative projects that are demonstrating the power of XML and its cousin XQuery. http://tc.eserver.org/34573.html http://tc.eserver.org/34573.html Bullets definitely have their place in writing. But far too often, they're used to replace crisp, well-thought-out writing. http://tc.eserver.org/34558.html http://tc.eserver.org/34558.html I have always liked the idea of medieval mapmakers using the phrase "Here Be Dragons" to denote unexplored or dangerous territories. Sticking a fire-breathing reptile in documentation when you run out of facts? That’s panache. These days, people aren’t so stylish. When an information architect (or user experience designer) doesn’t have the time (or the talent) to document content requirements, they stick a "page stack" on their site map. http://tc.eserver.org/34561.html http://tc.eserver.org/34561.html This essay takes up the call for a rhetoric of distributed space by proposing a folksonomic rhetoric. Folksonomies, systems in which users may name any object, space, idea, or image any name they want, offer technical communicators new possibilities for how they work in network environments. As a way to explore the possibility of a folksonomic rhetoric, this essay examines one specific space, Woodward Avenue in Detroit, Michigan, as if it were a folksonomic space. http://tc.eserver.org/34564.html http://tc.eserver.org/34564.html Faceted search, or guided navigation, has become the de facto standard for e-commerce and product-related websites, from big box stores to product review sites. But e-commerce sites aren’t the only ones joining the facets club. Other content-heavy sites such as media publishers (e.g. Financial Times: ft.com), libraries (e.g. NCSU Libraries: lib.ncsu.edu/), and even non-profits (e.g. Urban Land Institute: uli.org) are tapping into faceted search to make their often broad-range of content more findable. Essentially, faceted search has become so ubiquitous that users are not only getting used to it, they are coming to expect it. http://tc.eserver.org/34539.html http://tc.eserver.org/34539.html Structure and navigation must support each other and integrate with search and across subsites. Complexity, inconsistency, hidden options, and clumsy UI mechanics prevent users from finding what they need. http://tc.eserver.org/34542.html http://tc.eserver.org/34542.html Metadata has become in past few years the key element in the world of intellectual property creation and management. Most digital asset and content management system vendors now define their product by its ability to support custom metadata and in particulary Adobe’s XMP metadata technology. Besides being an excellent organizational tool, metadata is the essence of advertising, packaging and medical/financial/governmental record keeping and more. Every time we complete a form, we do so with metadata values in the form fields. Our Internet searches start with metadata keywords and end with information wrapped around and associated with those keywords. http://tc.eserver.org/34527.html http://tc.eserver.org/34527.html Social tagging ranges among the ``killer applications'' of Web 2.0. An ever-growing international community uses Web sites such as the photo database Flickr and the bookmarking service Delicious. In addition, a number of other portals use tagging to compile user-specific metadata on information on any subject—whether it be travel destinations, personal contacts, films, or museum exhibits. Retrieving and storing information via tagging seems to meet users' needs for a number of purposes and in many contexts. Starting with a synopsis of the current literature on social tagging and then focusing on the results of two surveys—qualitative interviews and an online questionnaire—this article explores the potential and limitations of tagging as a tool for organizing shared and personal knowledge. http://tc.eserver.org/34489.html http://tc.eserver.org/34489.html It's hard to look at a page of text and try to decide where to divide things to create individual topics. That "bottom up" approach is kind of pointless, in fact. There are better ways. http://tc.eserver.org/34485.html http://tc.eserver.org/34485.html When documents are built from components, and the components can have contextual variations, it becomes possible to construct built-to-order documents "on the fly", in response to user demands, rather than having to pre-create static versions of all possible variations. Once such a system is in place, it becomes possible for users to further customize the results by modifying the list of selected topics, rearranging their order, or even by adding new topics. http://tc.eserver.org/34442.html http://tc.eserver.org/34442.html Web Application Design Patterns by Pawan Vora provides practical user interface design guidance for developing web applications by offering a "working" starting point that designers can adapt and refine to develop creative solutions. He condenses best practice methods, along with research and solid experience to create a useful reference about designing web applications. http://tc.eserver.org/34385.html http://tc.eserver.org/34385.html Citing the rise of graphic novels, comics, and in particular, Google’s new web browser Chrome, which has a comic-book-style manual, Opsteegh argues that technical communicators can learn a thing or two about conveying information from graphic novelists. http://tc.eserver.org/34355.html http://tc.eserver.org/34355.html Specialization is the process by which new designs are created based on existing designs, allowing new kind of content to be processed using existing processing rules.Specialization allows you to define new kinds of information (new structural types or new domains of information), while reusing as much of existing design and code as possible, and minimizing or eliminating the costs of interchange, migration, and maintenance. http://tc.eserver.org/34356.html http://tc.eserver.org/34356.html Adobe FrameMaker 9 allows to use Ditaval based filtering of content while producing following output from a DITA Map. For using the Ditaval filtering with FrameMaker, first create a ditaval file specifying the filtering criteria and then select this ditaval file while producing the output. http://tc.eserver.org/34359.html http://tc.eserver.org/34359.html The Structure View allows for real-time validation of the structured element content while editing. It discourages the author from violating the constraint rules set by the EDD or XML schema which was earlier possible only while saving or exporting the document. The Structure View is now capable of pointing the constraint error for integer and float data constraints. The content will turn Red indicating that the content does not satisfy the data type constraint. http://tc.eserver.org/34361.html http://tc.eserver.org/34361.html This tutorial uses the DITA Open Toolkit 1.4.2.1 and the corresponding PDF plugin release, and Wrycan's demo text. This assumes you have a working DITA environment and can run the default formatting with PDF plugin. http://tc.eserver.org/34365.html http://tc.eserver.org/34365.html Claude Vedovini, the developer behind the DITA Open Platform, offers some thoughts about trends on the Web such as cloud computing, the usefulness of social networks when starting a small business, and Amazon S3. http://tc.eserver.org/34330.html http://tc.eserver.org/34330.html I decided to simplify the DITA publishing process for myself by building a Windows interface to Ant. Ant was developed to allow programmers to write a simple build file in an XML format, and then process that XML file with the Ant build software. http://tc.eserver.org/34331.html http://tc.eserver.org/34331.html This procedure is used to modify the DITA Open Toolkit build files to allow an external map file reference and alias strings to be added to the HTML Help Project file before building, as part of the transformation to Microsoft HTML Help (CHM) format. http://tc.eserver.org/34332.html http://tc.eserver.org/34332.html You can link to any tag within the page by quoting its ID. For example, if you have a paragraph with an ID of "intro", then you can link directly to that point without having to insert a bookmark. http://tc.eserver.org/34334.html http://tc.eserver.org/34334.html Almost 2 million book titles were published in the US alone, compared to more than the 1.3 million books published in the preceding 100 years. This change in the amount of information available for consumption is starting to change the way people read. How do we address the problem of information overload? Through good writing, and good information architecture. http://tc.eserver.org/34290.html http://tc.eserver.org/34290.html Task success is up substantially compared with usability statistics from 2004. Bad information architecture causes most of the remaining user failures. http://tc.eserver.org/34293.html http://tc.eserver.org/34293.html Given that regular drop-down menus are rife with usability problems, it takes a lot for me to recommend a new form of drop-down. But, as our testing videos show, mega drop-downs overcome the downsides of regular drop-downs. Thus, I can recommend one while warning against the other. http://tc.eserver.org/34295.html http://tc.eserver.org/34295.html Users often see online content out of context and read it with different goals than you envisioned. While you can't predict all such goals, you can plan for multiple uses of your text. http://tc.eserver.org/34264.html http://tc.eserver.org/34264.html If you're new to XML, this article introduces the basic construction of XML documents as well as the rules that you must follow to create well-formed XML, including naming conventions, proper tag nesting, attribute guidelines, declarations, and entities. You'll also gain an understanding of validation in terms of both DTD and schema usage. http://tc.eserver.org/34265.html http://tc.eserver.org/34265.html Rather than spend hours coming up with a complex numbering scheme, this might be an excuse to implement something far more straightforward discovered by an extensive readability study at IBM, of which I was a part. My work involved sitting behind a one-way mirror with a stopwatch, watching people take tests that involved, among other things, "how fast can you find Figure 3-4?" We had cameras mounted over the participant's shoulders and could watch them thumb through the documents, and we also monitored eye movements. Then we followed up with a short interview where we got feedback. http://tc.eserver.org/34261.html http://tc.eserver.org/34261.html Using Adobe FrameMaker 9, one can save a DITA Map in various formats depending on one’s requirements. It could be intermediary output, like – FrameMaker Book/Document; or it can be final output, like – Print/PDF. http://tc.eserver.org/34238.html http://tc.eserver.org/34238.html The primary function of current Web search engines is essentially relevance ranking at the document level. However, myriad structured information about real-world objects is embedded in static Web pages and online Web databases. Document-level information retrieval can unfortunately lead to highly inaccurate relevance ranking in answering object-oriented queries. In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift to enable searching at the object level. In traditional information retrieval models, documents are taken as the retrieval units and the content of a document is considered reliable. However, this reliability assumption is no longer valid in the object retrieval context when multiple copies of information about the same object typically exist. These copies may be inconsistent because of diversity of Web site qualities and the limited performance of current information extraction techniques. If we simply combine the noisy and inaccurate attribute information extracted from different sources, we may not be able to achieve satisfactory retrieval performance. In this paper, we propose several language models for Web object retrieval, namely an unstructured object retrieval model, a structured object retrieval model, and a hybrid model with both structured and unstructured retrieval features. We test these models on a paper search engine and compare their performances. We conclude that the hybrid model is the superior by taking into account the extraction errors at varying levels. http://tc.eserver.org/34239.html http://tc.eserver.org/34239.html Previous studies have highlighted the high arrival rate of new content on the web. We study the extent to which this new content can be efficiently discovered by a crawler. Our study has two parts. First, we study the inherent difficulty of the discovery problem using a maximum cover formulation, under an assumption of perfect estimates of likely sources of links to new content. Second, we relax this assumption and study a more realistic setting in which algorithms must use historical statistics to estimate which pages are most likely to yield links to new content. We recommend a simple algorithm that performs comparably to all approaches we consider. We measure the overhead of discovering new content, de- fined as the average number of fetches required to discover one new page. We show first that with perfect foreknowledge of where to explore for links to new content, it is possible to discover 90% of all new content with under 3% overhead, and 100% of new content with 9% overhead. But actual algorithms, which do not have access to perfect foreknowl- edge, face a more difficult task: one quarter of new content is simply not amenable to efficient discovery. Of the re- maining three quarters, 80% of new content during a given week may be discovered with 160% overhead if content is recrawled fully on a monthly basis. http://tc.eserver.org/34240.html http://tc.eserver.org/34240.html Design principles for XML schemas that eliminate redundancies and avoid update anomalies have been studied recently. Several normal forms, generalizing those for relational databases, have been proposed. All of them, however, are based on the assumption of a native XML storage, while in practice most of XML data is stored in relational databases. In this paper we study XML design and normalization for relational storage of XML documents. To be able to relate and compare XML and relational designs, we use an information-theoretic framework that measures information content in relations and documents, with higher values corresponding to lower levels of redundancy. We show that most common relational storage schemes preserve the notion of being well-designed (i.e., anomalies- and redundancy-free). Thus, existing XML normal forms guarantee well-designed relational storages as well. We further show that if this perfect option is not achievable, then a slight restriction on XML constraints guarantees a “second-best” relational design, according to possible values of the information-theoretic measure. We finally consider an edge-based relational representation of XML documents, and show that while it has similar information-theoretic properties with other relational representations, it can behave significantly worse in terms of enforcing integrity constraints. http://tc.eserver.org/34241.html http://tc.eserver.org/34241.html XML Schema’s abstract data model consists of components, which are the structures that eventually define a schema as a whole. XML Schema’s XML syntax, on the other hand, is not a direct representation of the schema components, and it proves to be surprisingly hard to derive a schema’s components from the XML syntax. The Schema Component XML Syntax (SCX) is a representation which attempts to map schema components as faithfully as possible to XML structures. SCX serves as the starting point for applications which need access to schema components and want to do so using standardized and widely available XML technologies. http://tc.eserver.org/34243.html http://tc.eserver.org/34243.html In this paper, we consider a way to represent contact center applications as a set of multiple XML documents written in different markups including VoiceXML and CCXML. Applications can comprise a dialog with IVR, call routing and agent scripting functionalities. We also consider ways how such applications can be executed in run-time contact center environment. http://tc.eserver.org/34194.html http://tc.eserver.org/34194.html With the growing use of dynamic web content generated from relational databases, traditional caching solutions for throughput and latency improvements are ineffective. We describe a middleware layer called Ganesh that reduces the volume of data transmitted without semantic interpretation of queries or results. It achieves this reduction through the use of cryptographic hashing to detect similarities with previous results. These benefits do not require any compromise of the strict consistency semantics provided by the back-end database. Further, Ganesh does not require modifications to applications, web servers, or database servers, and works with closed-source applications and databases. Using two benchmarks representative of dynamic web sites, measurements of our prototype show that it can increase end-to-end throughput by as much as twofold for non-data intensive applications and by as much as tenfold for data intensive ones. http://tc.eserver.org/34179.html http://tc.eserver.org/34179.html Workers in organizations frequently request help from assistants by sending request messages that express information intent: an intention to update data in an information system. Human assistants spend a significant amount of time and effort processing these requests. For example, human-resource assistants process requests to update personnel records, and executive assistants process requests to schedule conference rooms or to make travel reservations. To process the intent of a request, an assistant reads the request and then locates, completes, and submits a form that corresponds to the expressed intent. Automatically or semi-automatically processing the intent expressed in a request on behalf of an assistant would ease the mundane and repetitive nature of this kind of work. http://tc.eserver.org/34180.html http://tc.eserver.org/34180.html Traditionally, information extraction from web tables has focused on small, more or less homogeneous corpora, often based on assumptions about the use of TABLE tags. A multitude of different HTML implementations of web tables make these approaches difficult to scale. In this paper, we approach the problem of domain-independent information extraction from web tables by shifting our attention from the tree-based representation of web pages to a variation of the two-dimensional visual box model used by web browsers to display the information on the screen. The thereby obtained topological and style information allows us to fill the gap created by missing domain-specific knowledge about content and table templates. We believe that, in a future step, this approach can become the basis for a new way of large-scale knowledge acquisition from the current 'Visual Web.' http://tc.eserver.org/34183.html http://tc.eserver.org/34183.html In this paper, we present a novel method for the classification of Web sites. This method exploits both structure and content of Web sites in order to discern their functionality. It allows for distinguishing between eight of the most relevant functional classes of Web sites. We show that a pre-classification of Web sites utilizing structural properties considerably improves a subsequent textual classification with standard techniques. We evaluate this approach on a dataset comprising more than 16,000 Web sites with about 20 million crawled and 100 million known Web pages. Our approach achieves an accuracy of 92% for the coarse-grained classification of these Web sites. http://tc.eserver.org/34184.html http://tc.eserver.org/34184.html This paper presents a semantic portal, SEMPort, which provides better user support with personalized views, semantic navigation, ontology-based search and three different kinds of semantic hyperlinks. Distributed content editing and provision is supplied for the maintenance of the contents in real-time. As a case study, SEMPort is tested on the Course Modules Web Page (CMWP) of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS). http://tc.eserver.org/34185.html http://tc.eserver.org/34185.html In this paper, we describe an application, PubCloud that uses tag clouds for the summarization of results from queries over the PubMed database of biomedical literature. PubCloud responds to queries of this database with tag clouds generated from words extracted from the abstracts returned by the query. The results of a user study comparing the PubCloud tag-cloud summarization of query results with the standard result list provided by PubMed indicated that the tag cloud interface is advantageous in presenting descriptive information and in reducing user frustration but that it is less effective at the task of enabling users to discover relations between concepts. http://tc.eserver.org/34186.html http://tc.eserver.org/34186.html Syndication systems on the Web have attracted vast amounts of attention in recent years. As technologies have emerged and matured, there has been a transition to more expressive syndication approaches; that is, subscribers and publishers are provided with more expressive means of describing their interests and published content, enabling more accurate information filtering. In this paper, we formalize a syndication architecture that utilizes expressive Web ontologies and logic-based reasoning for selective content dissemination. This provides finer grained control for filtering and automated reasoning for discovering implicit subscription matches, both of which are not achievable in less expressive approaches. We then address one of the main limitations with such a syndication approach, namely matching newly published information with subscription requests in an efficient and practical manner. To this end, we investigate continuous query answering for a large subset of the Web Ontology Language (OWL); specifically, we formally define continuous queries for OWL knowledge bases and present a novel algorithm for continuous query answering in a large subset of this language. Lastly, an evaluation of the query approach is shown, demonstrating its effectiveness for syndication purposes. http://tc.eserver.org/34168.html http://tc.eserver.org/34168.html The role of the information architect (IA), interaction designer, or user experience (UX) designer is to help create architecture and interactions which will impact the user in constructive, meaningful ways. Sometimes the design choices are strategic and affect a broad interaction environment; other times they may be tactical and detailed, affecting few. But sometimes the design choices we make are not good enough for the users we’re trying to reach. Often a sense of democratic responsibility is missing in the artifacts and experiences which result from our designs and decisions. http://tc.eserver.org/34150.html http://tc.eserver.org/34150.html Since adaptation and reuse are core ideas of DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture), perhaps we'll be forgiven if we adapt and reuse old Beatles standards to explain the newest XML standards (hey, maybe it's the only way to make XML sound catchy). DITA is an IBM gift to the technical documentation community that was approved as a standard this spring by OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), the hosts for many XML interchange standards such as ebXML. Ever since, tech writers have been buzzing about an easier way to get into structured topic-based writing with DITA XML and asking XML Editor vendors to add support for DITA. http://tc.eserver.org/34151.html http://tc.eserver.org/34151.html With many database vendor products in the market and data intensive applications using them, it is often required to port the application to use the data or, migrate the data so that the application can use it. Migration of data is therefore one of the realities of the IT Industry. Some of the author's previous articles on migration can be found at the link.