The Inmates are Running the Asylum

The classic rules of business management are rooted in the manufacturing traditions of the industrial age. Unfortunately, they have yet to address the new realities of the information age, in which products are no longer made from atoms but are mostly software, made only from the arrangements of bits.

Cooper, Alan. Cooper Interaction Design (2004). Articles>Information Design>User Centered Design

Innovation in Classification

This article addresses two aspects of classification: innovation and faceted classification. Includes links to additional online resources involving classification.

Merholz, Peter. PeterMe (2001). Articles>Information Design>Metadata

An Integrated Approach for a Model Based Document Production and Management

The primary aim of the research presented in this paper is to provide pragmatic solutions to the problems of integrity and consistency of document based information, describing a building throughout its life cycle. The research demonstrates the computer-aided generation of project documents via a construction project data model. The first research activity involved the development of a Construction Project Reference Model (CPRM) and a Document Reference Model, from which various Applied Document Type Models can be derived. The work concentrated on the French Full Specification Document: the CCTP (Cahier des Clauses Techniques Particulières), which is generated during the detail design stage. A generic Association Model was developed and used to index the CPRM’s concepts to the CCTP’s documentary elements supporting their description. Finally, the mechanisms enabling the generation of the project CCTP from the proposed structured reference CCTP are described.

Rezgui, Yacine and Philippe Debras. ITcon (1996). Articles>Document Design>Information Design

Integrating Content Management with Portals: Meeting Enterprise Information Needs  

Effective communication is a top priority for most businesses. To help create, manage, and access information that is used to conduct e-business, technologies such as content management (CM) and enterprise information portals (EIP) are dominating IT and CIO discussions. We will review how these rapidly evolving technologies come together to provide benefits for enterprise implementers. Given the historical deployment of these technologies, many associate the application of content management solutions to externally facing sites, serving transactional e-business needs; and the application of portals to internally facing sites for general employee access to a wide range of information sources and applications. However, both technologies can provide support for the complete information lifecycle, from information creation to management to delivery.

CAP Ventures. Articles>Content Management>Information Design

Integrating Information Architecture into Your Information Development Processes  

The most critical and time-consuming aspect of your decision to adopt information architecture as a backbone of your information development process might not be the adoption of new guidelines or tools, but moving the mindset and culture of the organization so that it can operate effectively in the new paradigm. Using examples from real experiences, the authors of this paper describe the organizational 'culture shock' that can occur when a team or organization moves to an information-architected model for content delivery--the likely pitfalls and some ways to overcome them.

Kowalski, Lee Anne, Andrea Ames, Michelle Corbin and David McCaleb. STC Proceedings (2004). Articles>Information Design>Workflow

Integrating Partner Information Using XML and XSL  

BMC Software Inc., a company that writes utility tools for database administrators, wanted to reuse the error messages from partner database companies. Having learned that two of these database companies already used single-source files for their error messages, BMC Software integrated the information about the error messages from the database companies. We accomplished our goal by negotiating with our partner companies for the source files of the error message information. This session discusses how we took those source files and modified them to create simple XML files, then transformed them into HTML using XSL transforms within a product.

Gentle, Anne. STC Proceedings (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML>XSL

Interaction Design Sessions

This article covers the design stage that marks the next step in the design process after site visits have been conducted and evaluated: It describes the process of successively deriving an interaction design from the data. The following article describes the creating of an interaction design - one of the most important steps involved in the creation of a user-oriented application system. This step is taken directly after the collection and analysis of data in working practice, gathered during site visits. The user interaction design is derived from this data successively.

Fuss, Margarete. SAP Design Guild (2002). Design>Information Design>Interaction Design>Web Design

Interactive and Animated Pictures: Mere Visual Stimulation or Better Clarity?  

Digitalisation has revolutionised the creation and editing of graphics, and ushered in new forms of technical communication on the visual plane. In online documentation, interactive illustrations and animations play an important role, but creating them is definitely time consuming and expensive. But is all the effort really worthwhile? Are animated and interactive images automatically also self-explanatory? Or what are their didactic benefits?

Ballstaedt, Steffen-Peter. tekom (2006). Articles>Information Design

International Information Architecture

There are all sorts of idiosyncratic reasons why information architects should reach across borders.

Morville, Peter. Semantic Studios (2004). Articles>Information Design>International

Internet Library

There's a lot of bragging on the Internet about how big it is, how much information the Web has to offer. I ran across a discussion group posting a while back where the moderator announced that one of the search engines had indexed 9 billion words. I went to the University of California online catalog and did a quick calculation: 9 million titles x 300 pages x 500 words.

Coyle, Karen. Karen Coyle (1997). Presentations>Information Design>Accessibility

Interview with L.J. Haravu  

An interview with the senior manager of Library and Document Services for the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics.

Kudesia, Saurabh. KnowGenesis IJTC (2007). Articles>Interviews>Information Design

Interview with Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville

An O'Reilly interview with Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld about their book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, their work, and the field of information architecture.

Hill, Scott. O'Reilly and Associates (2000). Articles>Information Design>Interviewing

An Interview with Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld, Information Architects

An interview with Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld covering the topic of what the information architecture is, how information architecture relates to usability, and the challenges faced when constructing a successful information architecture.

Evans, Meryl K. Digital Web Magazine (2002). Careers>Information Design

Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Incentives in Profit–Oriented Firms Supplying Open Source Products and Services  

This paper contributes to the literature on Open Source (OS) software by providing empirical evidence on the incentives of firms that engage in OS activities. Data collected by a survey conducted on 146 Italian companies supplying OS solutions (Open Source firms) show that (surprisingly) intrinsic, community–based incentives do play a role but are not, in general, put into practise. We investigate this discrepancy between attitudes and behaviours and single out groups of firms adopting more consistent behaviours. Our results are in line with the literature on business models of the firms that enter the Open Source field.

Rossi, Cristina and Andrea Bonaccorsi. First Monday (2005). Articles>Information Design>Case Studies>Open Source

Introducción a la Arquitectura de Información

Una introducción a la profesión, escrita por el Arquitecto de Información chileno Javier Velasco.

Velasco, Javier. PeterMe (2001). (Spanish) Articles>Information Design

Introducing JSON (JavaScript Object Notation)

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate. It is based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language, Standard ECMA-262 3rd Edition - December 1999. JSON is a text format that is completely language independent but uses conventions that are familiar to programmers of the C-family of languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and many others. These properties make JSON an ideal data-interchange language.

JSON (2007). Articles>Information Design>Standards>Ajax

Introducing SOAP

SOAP or Simple Object Access Protocol has become a standard mechanism in the world of Web Services. Now what exactly does this mean? And how can I make use of it inside Acrobat?

Wraight, Dave. PlanetPDF (2004). Design>Information Design>XML>SOAP

Introducing XML Internationalization

One key benefit of XML is the fact that it was designed for international use. But do you really understand the concepts of internationalization and localization? This article explains what they are, how they work, and why you want to use them.

Silberman, Hernan. IBM (2007). Articles>Information Design>XML>International

An Introduction to Database Normalization

When users ask for advice about their database applications, one of the first things I try to help them with is the normalization of their table structure. Normalization is the process of removing redundant data from your tables in order to improve storage efficiency, data integrity and scalability. This improvement is balanced against an increase in complexity and potential performance losses from the joining of the normalized tables at query-time.

Hillyer, Mike. MySQL (2004). Articles>Information Design>Databases>SQL

Introduction to DITA References

DITA is quickly becoming the dominant XML schema for topic-oriented authoring. DITA is a highly practical way of moving to XML authoring in general and granular content reuse in particular. DITA distinguishes itself from predecessor standards by explicitly rejecting the book paradigm in favour of a topic-oriented model.

Prescod, Paul. IDEAlliance (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML>DITA

An Introduction to Extensible Stylesheet Language  

Introduces the three technologies that comprise the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) family of specifications as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Hodge, Drew W. Intercom (2004). Articles>Information Design>XML>XSL

Introduction to Information Architecture

Information Architect: 1) the individual who organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear; 2) a person who creates the structure or map of information which allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge; 3) the emerging 21st century professional occupation addressing the needs of the age focused upon clarity, human understanding and the science of the organization of information.

Rosenfeld, Louis and Peter Morville. O'Reilly and Associates (1998). Design>Information Design>Web Design

An Introduction to Metadata

Metadata is structured data which describes the characteristics of a resource. It shares many similar characteristics to the cataloguing that takes place in libraries, museums and archives. The term 'meta' derives from the Greek word denoting a nature of a higher order or more fundamental kind. A metadata record consists of a number of pre-defined elements representing specific attributes of a resource, and each element can have one or more values.

Taylor, Chris. University of Queensland (2003). Articles>Information Design>Metadata

Introduction to OMG's Unified Modeling Language (UML)

Large enterprise applications - the ones that execute core business applications, and keep a company going - must be more than just a bunch of code modules. They must be structured in a way that enables scalability, security, and robust execution under stressful conditions, and their structure - frequently referred to as their architecture - must be defined clearly enough that maintenance programmers can (quickly!) find and fix a bug that shows up long after the original authors have moved on to other projects. That is, these programs must be designed to work perfectly in many areas, and business functionality is not the only one (although it certainly is the essential core). Of course a well-designed architecture benefits any program, and not just the largest ones as we've singled out here. We mentioned large applications first because structure is a way of dealing with complexity, so the benefits of structure (and of modeling and design, as we'll demonstrate) compound as application size grows large. Another benefit of structure is that it enables code reuse: Design time is the easiest time to structure an application as a collection of self-contained modules or components. Eventually, enterprises build up a library of models of components, each one representing an implementation stored in a library of code modules. When another application needs the same functionality, the designer can quickly import its module from the library. At coding time, the developer can just as quickly import the code module into the application.

UML Resource Page (2005). Articles>Information Design>XML>UML

Introduction to Relations in XML Schema

This is the first article in a series concentrating on implementing relations for designing robust XML schema definitions.

Chaterjee, Jagadish. Dev Articles (2006). Articles>Information Design>Databases>XML