User Interface Implementations of Faceted Browsing

Just as it is important to choose the proper knife when slicing-n-dicing vegetables, it is critical to prescribe a suitable user interface to support faceted filtering. Faceted filtering allows you to narrow down a large list of objects to a manageable size by applying flexible combinations of attribute filters in any order. Rather than forcing you down fixed paths within a website’s information architecture, faceted filtering allows you to multi-dimensionally slice-n-dice the information in a manner that best accommodates your specific needs. A user interface that optimally supports faceted filtering must expose its robust functionality in a way that expresses affordances, controls complexity, and follows existing standards that have been pre-established across the web.

Padilla, Mike. Digital Web Magazine (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Information Design

Information Architecture for My Office

To get a handle on the challenge in front of me, I created a complete item inventory of everything currently in my office. I used Microsoft Excel and created a spreadsheet.

Swope, Amber. Content Wrangler, The (2008). Articles>Information Design>Workplace

The Wisdom of Crowds Meets the Wisdom of Authors: How XML Enables the Semantic Web

Key to the Semantic Web is semantic markup, which lets users annotate their web pages with metadata -- HTML attributes that don't get displayed in the document. Semantic metadata describes what the pages are about, letting authors define things with authority and precision.

Wlodarczyk, Paul. Content Wrangler, The (2008). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>XML

The Rise Of Hyperlocal Information

The net effect of social networking is the increasing availability of fine-grained information about locales. This information is both interesting and valuable. It is sought after by people living in these places and by advertisers who are trying to reach these people. A handful of startups are recognizing the big potential of local information - relevance. In this post we look at different aspects of the hyperlocality, from satellites to local blogs, and ponder how this information will be organized and monetized.

Iskold, Alex. ReadWriteWeb (2008). Articles>Information Design>Content Management>Wikis

Tailor-Made DITA    

DITA is known for the rigidity of its structure, but technical communicators have opportunities to adapt it to their content through specialization, a term that refers to the customization of DITA structures.

Sliwinski, Larissa. Intercom (2008). Articles>Information Design>XML>DITA

The Hidden Cost of DITA    

Many people see DITA architecture as a shortcut to avoiding content modeling. O'Keefe warns readers against this mistake.

O'Keefe, Sarah S. Intercom (2008). Articles>Information Design>XML>DITA

Managing Technology, Managing Technologists

Librarians are being made CIO's less for our technical skills than for our organizational skills and our ability to manage the complex change that is fostered by or linked to technological change.

Baker, Shirley. Washington University (2008). Articles>Management>Knowledge Management>Information Design

Affinity Diagram

The affinity diagram, or KJ method (after its author, Kawakita Jiro), wasn't originally intended for quality management. Nonetheless, it has become one of the most widely used of the Japanese management and planning tools. The affinity diagram was developed to discovering meaningful groups of ideas within a raw list. In doing so, it is important to let the groupings emerge naturally, using the right side of the brain, rather than according to preordained categories.

SkyMark (2005). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Charts and Graphs

The KJ-Technique: A Group Process for Establishing Priorities

In design, our resources are limited. Priorities become a necessity. We need to ensure we are working on the most important parts of the problem. How do we assess what is most important?

Spool, Jared M. User Interface Engineering (2004). Articles>Information Design>Project Management>Charts and Graphs

What is Affinity Diagramming?

Affinity Diagramming is a very simple but powerful technique for grouping and understanding information. In particular, affinity diagramming provides a good way to identify and analyze issues. There are several variations of the technique.

Information and Design (2006). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Charts and Graphs

Brint.com: Why More is Not Better

Information architect Lou Rosenfeld never thought he'd criticize a website for being over-architected. Then he saw Brint.com and its 16 navigational systems.

Rosenfeld, Louis. CIO Magazine (2000). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>User Centered Design

Yes, Information Architecture is Rocket Science

Why do I think there is some complexity to creating a good IA for a website, when to others it appears simple?

Spencer, Donna. DonnaM (2008). Articles>Information Design

Overview of Metadata

Thus "metadata" means "data that deal with other data," or "data that deal with original data,"or casually but briefly, "data about data." Within the library- and information-science (LIS) community, the most frequent use of "metadata" is to refer to data produced as part of the process of cataloging of materials in libraries and other information agencies.

Wyllys, R.E. University of Texas (2000). Articles>Information Design>Metadata

Demystifying Metadata

As long as people have been collecting information together, be it in the form of a library, an institutional filing system, a collection of accounting records or whatever, they've needed to come up with ways to help them know how to properly file and retrieve documents. These systems needn't involve any high technology.

Lucas, Marty. Mappa Mundi (1999). Articles>Information Design>Metadata

Developing and Creatively Leveraging Hierarchical Metadata and Taxonomy

In content metadata and hierarchies, you will often find a goldmine of implicit and explicit data that you can leverage to creatively contextualise content. After a brief introduction on taxonomy and metadata, this article focuses on finding and utilising such relationships in hierarchies.

Ricci, Christian. Boxes and Arrows (2004). Articles>Information Design>Metadata

Faceted Metadata Search and Browse

Metadata is information about information: more precisely, it's structured information about resources. This can be a single set of hierarchical subject labels, such as a Yahoo or Open Directory Project category. More often, the metadata has several facets: attributes in various orthogonal sets of categories. This is often stored in database record fields and tables, especially for product catalogs.

SearchTools.com (2007). Articles>Information Design>Metadata

Folksonomies Plus Controlled Vocabularies

We need a word for the class of comparisons that assumes that the status quo is cost-free, so that all new work, when it can be shown to have disadvantages to the status quo, is also assumed to be inferior to the status quo.

Shirky, Clay. Corante (2005). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Controlled Vocabulary

Folksonomies? How about Metadata Ecologies?

Folksonomies are clearly compelling, supporting a serendipitous form of browsing that can be quite useful. But they don't support searching and other types of browsing nearly as well as tags from controlled vocabularies applied by professionals.

Rosenfeld, Louis. Louis Rosenfeld (2005). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Social Networking

It's Time To Get Serious About Metadata

When it comes to the Web, there is nothing more misunderstood than metadata. Technical people search vainly for a way to automate its creation. Many editors and writers want nothing to do with it. And yet without quality metadata a website cannot properly achieve its objectives. It’s time to get serious about metadata.

McGovern, Gerry. New Thinking (2004). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Metadata

Living With Topic Maps and RDF

This paper is about the relationship between the topic map and RDF standards families. It compares the two technologies and looks at ways to make it easier for users to live in a world where both technologies are used. This is done by looking at how to convert information back and forth between the two technologies, how to convert schema information, and how to do queries across both information representations. Ways to achieve all of these goals are presented.

Garshol, Lars Marius. Ontopia (2004). Articles>Information Design>Sitemaps>XML

Metacrap: Putting the Torch to Seven Straw-Men of the Meta-Utopia

Metadata is "data about data" -- information like keywords, page-length, title, word-count, abstract, location, SKU, ISBN, and so on. Explicit, human-generated metadata has enjoyed recent trendiness, especially in the world of XML A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities.

Doctorow, Cory. Well.com (2001). Articles>Information Design>Metadata

Metadata and Search

The 2003 Dublin Core Conference took as its basic premise that "Metadata is fundamental to persons, organizations, machines, and an array of enterprises that are increasingly turning to the Web and electronic communication for disseminating and accessing information." One of the reasons metadata is receiving such attention is its role in facilitating information seeking.

Crystal, Abe and Paula Land. Dublin Core (2003). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Search

Metadata on the Web: On the Integration of RDF and Topic Maps

Meta-information provides an additional layer of abstraction on web documents that can be used for sophisticated applications relying on the precise semantic characterization of their content. Two leading standards, RDF and Topic Maps, compete as the model through which expressing metadata. These two models are sufficiently different as to make back and forth conversion a difficult and imprecise task. In this paper, we introduce META, a set of integrated tools helping in editing, navigating and converting metadata expressed in either language.

Ciancarini, Paolo, Riccardo Gentilucci, Marco Pirruccio, Valentina Presutti and Fabio Vitali. Extreme Markup Languages (2003). Articles>Information Design>Sitemaps>Metadata

Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps!

Information architects have so far applied known and well-tried tools from library science to solve this problem, and now topic maps are sailing up as another potential tool for information architects. This raises the question of how topic maps compare with the traditional solutions, and that is the question this paper attempts to address.

Garshol, Lars Marius. Ontopia (2004). Articles>Information Design>Metadata>Sitemaps