A Team Approach to Information Architecture

A case study of a team approach to information architecture at Duke University by graduates of the Duke Continuing Studies Technical Communication Certificate program.

Olson, Amy, Sangita Koli and Dino Ruggiero. Carolina Communique (2008). Articles>Business Communication>Information Design>Content Management

Business Information Survey    

Survey of business information services in corporate information services, based on in-depth interviews with leading business information managers. Key findings are: Business information budgets have been stable, with at least inflationary increases built in; Business conditions have been turbulent of late but this has had no real impact on the services to date; With more information rolled out to the clients' desktops, the services are all working to add value through a variety of approaches, including training, evaluation and analysis, business and client development, and generally undertaking more complex work; Some pressure on the staffing headcount in the services during the year; Recruiting suitable information professionals is a difficult process; Offshoring information and research work has not expanded significantly but more companies are considering this option; 'Techno-centric' knowledge management remains important in some companies, particularly law firms, but is fading as a practice in others; There is great interest and envisaged potential in social technology and Web 2.0 tools and techniques -- but not much serious deployment yet; Even in mature corporate information environments, marketing business information services is still seen as crucial by 90 per cent of respondents; Fifty-five percent of the services provide some kind of competitor information function, albeit not at a high level; A significant majority (75 per cent) of services support compliance functions such as 'Know your client' and anti-money laundering checks; Existing copyright provisions are seen as a barrier to effective information dissemination within companies by 80 per cent of respondents; LexisNexis takes over at the top of the expenditure league; The demand for information on Asian business markets is growing; Almost all services are committed to training users in the discovery and use of digital business information sources; The organization, management, and sometimes realignment of services is the highest strategic priority.

Foster, Allan. Business Information Review (2008). Articles>Business Communication>Information Design

Change Architecture: Bringing Information Architecture to the Business Domain

As information architects, we are not just architecting information; we are using information to architect change. Bob Goodman shows us how we can use business and management techniques to help us be more effective agents of change.

Goodman, Bob. Boxes and Arrows (2006). Articles>Information Design>Business Communication

Electronic Publishing of Scientific Manuscripts

To write a chapter about a topic which is so new and developing so rapidly that changes take place just about everyday is an interesting challenge. What I hope to accomplish in these few pages is to explain what electronic publishing is and explore a number of issues associated with this new area of information dissemination. Yes!, this is a new area of dissemination! And perhaps this is the place to start - by defining electronic publishing. Electronic publishing is a new form of communication. Electronic publishing, for the purposes of scholarly scientific presentation of results, is the creation of a scholarly work which is in a totally electronic (non-paper) form from its creation to its publication or dissemination. An electronic journal is a product that was specifically developed and designed for the Internet, a product which is not re-worked printed material that is delivered electronically. As I hope to show in this chapter, electronic journals and electronic publishing is much more than an alternat

Heller, Stephen R. hellers.com. Articles>Scientific Communication>Information Design

IM Bots  

Campbell discusses the role technical communicators can play in developing IM (instant messaging) bots--programs that correspond with IM users--for customer support purposes.

Campbell, Walter. Intercom (2003). Articles>Information Design>Communication>Instant Messaging

IDEA 2008: An Interview with Elliott Malkin

Where the seams of information and public space overlap and intersect, Elliott Malkin creates projects that span genres from religion to natural science. In a preview of his upcoming IDEA conference talk, Malkin talks about home-movies, butterflies, and designing for unofficial signs in public space.

Danzico, Liz. Boxes and Arrows (2008). Articles>Interviews>Information Design>Scientific Communication

The Benefits of ebXML for e-Business

The ebXML specifications have matured rapidly over the past year. New components and capabilities have extended the architecture for service oriented architectures (SOA). Learn about this new comprehensive release of ebXML that is available from OASIS.

Webber, David. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>Business Communication>XML

Computing for the Mathematical Sciences with XML, Web Services, and P2P

While computing the Mathematical Sciences is similar to other scientific areas, often the researcher lacks the resources to carry out those computations. Grid computing and web services provide some possibilities for solutions but they do not address the increasing demand for computing resources and ad hoc computation networks. This paper describes a solution to this that uses peer-to-peer technologies to build ad hoc networks of computational agents that all speak XML to carry out computations.

Milowski, R. Alexander. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Information Design>Scientific Communication>XML

Large Scale Validation of Millions of UBL Invoices with XML Schema and Schematron

Since February 1st 2005, millions of invoices have been exchanged between the private sector and the public sector in Denmark. This paper focuses on real life problems, experiences and solutions with syntactical and semantical validation of millions of electronic invoices. Localization and documentation for regional and national use is a massive and important assignment. I.e. decisions on the use of identifiers have to be specified and local payment methods must be mapped to the international standard. The result is a message with many internal integrity constraints that cannot be validated with the UBL schemas alone. In order to provide even stronger validation, non-normative supplementary schemas have been developed. These schemas perform stronger validation based on decisions about the use of national identifiers for companies and persons. In addition to the use of XML schema – Schematron is used for the validation of internal referential integrity constraints. Experiences and theoretical considerations on the localization of international vocabularies are discussed.

Brun, Mikkel Hippe, Brian Nielsen, Christian Lanng and Bryan Rasmussen. IDEAlliance (2005). Articles>Information Design>Business Communication>XML

XML-Based Multimodal Interaction Framework for Contact Center Applications  

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.

Anisimov, Nikolay, Brian Galvin and Herbert Ristock. WWW 2007 (2007). Articles>Business Communication>Information Design>XML

Playing Doctor? Trends in Health Information Seeking on the Web

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.

Straub, Kathleen. UI Design Newsletter (2007). Articles>Information Design>Scientific Communication>Biomedical

A Grounded Theory Model of On-Duty Critical Care Nurses' Information Behavior: The Patient-Chart Cycle of Informative Interactions     

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.

McKnight, Michelynn. Journal of Documentation (2007). Articles>Information Design>Scientific Communication>Biomedical

Use and Outcome of Online Health Information Services: A Study Among Scottish Population    

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.

Harbour, Jenny and Gobinda G. Chowdhury. Journal of Documentation (2007). Articles>Information Design>Scientific Communication>Biomedical

Market Data and Business Information    

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.

Ainsworth, Martin. Business Information Review (2009). Articles>Information Design>Business Communication