information design

How to Write Interesting Headings for Documentation

Perhaps our headings should focus a bit more on user benefits? For example, "Overview of batch printing - Save time and improve document organization" is a bit more engaging, especially if your customer is struggling with those issues.

Web Standards for E-Books

The internet did not replace television, which did not replace cinema, which did not replace books. E-books aren’t going to replace books either. E-books are books, merely with a different form. The electronic book is the latest example of how HTML continues to win out over competing, often nonstandardized, formats. E-books aren’t websites, but E-books are distributed electronically. Now the dominant E-book format is XHTML.

Making Pagination Meaningful

Working with long lists of information over a network, like web email, can be problematic. If a user needs to hunt for something, she’s going to need access to other pages, and this article is about how those controls should look and behave.

DITA Tools 1 (Planning)

The IBM Information Architecture Workbench is an Eclipse-based freeware that I find marvellously handy for organising my thoughts and then committing those thoughts to DITA files. With it, I can model my ditamaps, generate DITA stub files* for the ditamap nodes, and edit the DITA files. Plus, if I draw a line from File A to File B, it gets registered in the ditamap's relationship table. All pretty neat and clean. It shows me, visually, how my topics are arranged in my book (and lets me move around files with a drag-and-drop action). It also shows me orphan files - those nodes that I created but did not link anywhere. And, I can edit the DITA attributes very easily in the Properties view.

DITA Tools 2 (Authoring)

I am very comfortable with using Notepad to write in DITA. But there are times when I forget if a particular DITA tag can be used at a particular place. For example, I regularly forget if <prereq> should precede <context> or follow. At such times, an XML editor that also validates your tags as you type comes in handy. XMLmind XML Editor is one such tool and comes bundled with the DITA DTDs and schemas. Its personal edition is free to use for non-commercial purposes and is, thus, great if you want a WYSIWYG DITA editor for your learning and other personal stuff.

Trees, Maps, and Theorems: Effective Communication for Rational Minds

Before I begin the official review of this work, let me briefly suspend all scholarly analysis and say this: Trees, Maps, and Theorems: Effective Communication for Rational Minds is an awesome book. All technical communication practitioners and professors should own a copy.

Case Against Vertical Navigation

Five reasons why vertical navigation should not be used and why designers and architects should almost always construct their sites with horizontal navigation in mind.

The Importance of Being Categorized (Correctly)

Categories are only useful if they meets the needs of the user. I can’t imagine that the variations of what I think of as “Science Fiction books” that were listed in the category are of any use to anyone.

The Simple Secret to Good Dropdown Navigation

Almost every example of good dropdown navigation on the web today relies on a single, simple HTML structure: the nested unordered list. Without this structure, dropdown menus would be much more complex to build than they already are.

Toward a Realization of the n-Dimensional Text

Without detouring into software and platform studies, I will simply state that it is beyond time that digital archives of texts begin to adhere to the methodologies learned from Web 2.0 activities and applications (for we are now in a post-2.0, a Web n.0, time) and embrace the concepts of layering shared data and user-generated or user-customized content onto the core curated data within the archive.

Image Maps for Help System Navigation

One of my goals was to make it easy to get help for using specific parts of our application. Users don’t need to know the name of the panel or feature they are trying to use. They just need to know where they are working on the screen, and they can click through to get the help that discusses that part of the screen.

Tree Testing: A Quick Way to Evaluate your Information Architecture

A big part of information architecture is organisation – creating the structure of a site. For most sites – particularly large ones – this means creating a hierarchical “tree” of topics. But to date, the IA community hasn’t found an effective, simple technique (or tool) to test site structures. The most common method used—closed card sorting—is neither widespread nor particularly suited to this task.

Usability Testing Trends in Library Services

In their efforts to ensure new resources are user-friendly and easy to navigate, librarians are increasingly taking on the roles of web designer and usability professional. White discusses how librarians can best evaluate the new services they offer.

Red Route Usability: The Key User Journeys with Your Web Site

Important roads in London are known as 'red routes' and Transport for London do everything in their power to make sure passenger journeys on these routes are completed as smoothly and quickly as possible. Define the red routes for your web site and you'll be able to identify and eliminate any usability obstacles on the key user journeys.

The Effects of Headings in Information Mapping on Search Speed and Evaluation of a Brief Health Education Text

The accessibility of written information becomes an increasingly relevant issue in today's information-dense society. Although headings are generally known to signal textual content and thus aid access, it remains unclear how frequently headings should be used for optimal document use. Information Mapping© is a text writing method that systematically splits up text in chunks accompanied by headings. The present paper presents a study in which a print health education document was varied systematically in accordance with the Information Mapping method, to examine the effects of heading frequency and information order on participants' search speed and their evaluation of the text layout. Results showed that the presence of headings in a text indeed contributed to easier access in the search tasks. Although no differences in search speed were found with varying numbers of headings in the text, some subjective opinions were in favour of the version with most headings. The different information order of the Information Mapping text had no effect.

Metadata-Enhanced Visual Interfaces to Digital Libraries

Information visualization offers a variety of ways in which digital library collections can be represented on the interface and shown to the user. Metadata, a key component of solid digital libraries, has been utilized to enhance visual user interfaces to digital libraries. This paper reports on a study conducted to investigate and analyze a specific category of digital library visual interface that supports information seeking, exploration and retrieval based on metadata representations, namely metadata-enhanced visual interfaces. This study examined 21 metadata-enhanced digital library visual interfaces from the following perspectives: (a) information access and retrieval features; (b) metadata elements; (c) visualization techniques and metaphors. The results demonstrated that the combined use of visualization techniques and metaphors is becoming increasingly prevalent as a design strategy to support users' information exploration. The results also suggest that visual interfaces enhanced with metadata are becoming more widespread to provide a richer representation of digital collections.

Testing a Decision-Theoretic Approach to the Evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems

With information overload a real problem, especially on the Internet, there has been much interest in developing effective and efficient information retrieval (IR) systems. The various information retrieval approaches will require accurate evaluation to justify the requisite substantial development and implementation investment. Recently, a comprehensive and integrated evaluation model has been proposed and illustrated. By analyzing the evaluation measures using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), the model transforms IR evaluation into a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem, which assesses both the IR outcome and the interactive IR process. This paper extends that research by refining the evaluation model and by testing the research question through mathematical testing and simulation. The tests confirm the need to include both process and outcome criteria in any IR evaluation and prove the superiority of the proposed decision-theoretic approach over the traditional evaluation methodologies that focus on the IR outcome alone.

Role of Information Competencies and Skills In Learning to Abstract

The ability to abstract information is a basic competency in today's knowledge society, characterized by the mass diffusion of information and the need to manage and access it effectively. Yet abstracting is not an easy task, and requires a specific learning process. This paper examines the process of abstracting information from the perspective of competencies and skills-based learning of students of information and documentation. The competencies and skills necessary in this process, which are drawn from European sources on library science and documentation, are identified by analysing in detail the various stages and processes involved in writing an abstract. The general skills required for the whole process, as well as the specific skills for each stage, are determined. Guidelines and recommendations are put forward to facilitate the learning of these skills in the context of abstracting.

Get to Know XML

The XML format was developed in the 1990s in a hope to develop a universal format for documents, replacing proprietary binary formats that couldn’t integrate with one another. And we’re beginning to see the results. In this talk, Dr. Geoffrey Sauer will present an introduction to XML, with an overview that will explain to people who’re not familiar with it why this is a good thing, and how we can begin to use XML formats to our advantage as technical communicators.

Solution Provider Creates OBA to Simplify DITA-Based Content Creation and Reuse

When the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) emerged as a public standard for working with structured content, Content Technologies recognized its value. It also saw problems for companies trying to widely deploy an authoring architecture that requires XML experts and special tools. So the solution provider built DITA Exchange, which enables users to develop and publish DITA content using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. To make the process even easier, the company built an Office Business Application that enables any user to create DITA content within the Microsoft Office Word 2007 user interface. Because Content Technologies customers can roll out the authoring solution across the enterprise to simplify content reuse and maximize return on investment, the solution has received strong interest from many organizations.

A Pleasant Little Chat about XML

XML [EXtensible Markup Language] is what its name suggests: a markup language, much like HTML. In fact, XML and HTML are siblings (if you want to think of it that way) in that they are both derivatives of SGML, or “Standard Generalized Markup Language”. XML is not a programming language (neither is HTML for that matter).

Keeping Up Online: an Intro to RSS

A website that supports syndication publishes something called a “feed”; that feed can either be collected by a program called a feedreader or news aggregator, or it can be combined (“mashed up”) with another feed. In what follows, I’ll introduce you to some resources to help you get started, and discuss some best practices for managing your feeds.

Building a Content Framework

A content framework is a library of content types and metadata along with detailed guidelines for how to use the framework to create specific customer experiences. A content framework provides the underlying concepts, best practices, guidelines and structure to enable you to rapidly design, build, test and deliver an effective customer-centric content experience. This article provides an overview of the components of a content framework.

Telling Your Website’s Story with Sketchboarding

There’s been quite a lot of discussion recently on blogs that cover user experience, with some very unique vantage points. The overarching question: What methods drive the solutions that we present to our clients?

The Myth of the Page Fold: Evidence from User Testing

As web professionals, we all know that the concept of the page fold being an impenetrable barrier for users is a myth. Over the last 6 years we’ve watched over 800 user testing sessions between us and on only 3 occasions have we seen the page fold as a barrier to users getting to the content they want. In this article we’re going to break down the page fold myth and give some tips to ensure content below the fold gets seen.

OAXAL: Open Architecture for XML Authoring and Localization

XML is now acknowledged as the best format for authoring technical documentation. Its wide support, extensible nature, separation of form and content, and ability to publish in a wide variety of output formats such as PDF, HTML, and RTF make it a natural choice. XML, thanks to its extensible nature and rigorous syntax, has also spawned many standards that allow the exchange of information between different systems and organizations, as well as new ways of organizing, transforming, and reusing existing assets. For publishing and translation, this has created a new way of using and exploiting existing documentation assets, known as Open Architecture for XML Authoring and Localization (OAXAL).

The DITA Open Toolkit Architecture

The DITA Open Toolkit is an open source implementation of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee's specification for Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) DTDs and schemas. The toolkit is a major upgrade from its predecessor, the developerWorks version known as "dita132." The toolkit uses open source solution of ANT, XSLT (currently 1.0) and Java to implement transformation functions from DITA content (maps and topics) into different deliverable formats.

Level Five: Semantics on Demand

As DITA diversifies to occupy more roles within an organization, single- application solutions can no longer provide the specialized support each author or product may require. Instead, a cross-application, cross-silo strategy that shares DITA as a common semantic currency lets groups use the toolset most appropriate for their content authoring and management needs, while sharing content and even moving authoring responsibility between groups throughout the content life cycle. Beyond automation of known processes, we now have the flexibility to combine new applications and sources of content as needed, providing processing flexibility and an adaptable, evolutionary content strategy.

Introduction to DITA Topic-Based Authoring with Adobe FrameMaker 8

For over a decade, Extensible Markup Language (XML) authoring has offered benefits to publishing organizations, including content reuse, multichannel publishing, and standards-based information exchange. Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) offers a specific form of XML authoring that has the potential to revolutionize technical documentation. DITA represents a form of topic-based authoring, which has emerged as a best practice in technical documentation. Adobe FrameMaker 8 has built-in support for the core features of DITA. This article offers a brief introduction to topic-based authoring with DITA and FrameMaker 8.

Information Industry: Structure, Partnership and Change

Information industry gloom in 2009 In the last Initiatives column in the June 2009 issue we wrote: 'Market studies based on 2008 data only gives a part of the picture. However much information vendors whistle in the dark and make positive public statements, the hard reality is that the shakeout of the sector will continue in a variety of ways. Outsell's 2009 predictions for "slower but fairly consistent growth overall" (see below) look optimistic, certainly for the business information part of the industry'. It's interesting to see that Outsell has caught up with our view. In its new report 'What is Good Performance in 2009?' it scales down growth projections for the information industry because of the unprecedented economic downturn. The company is revising its 2009 'guidance' from late last year for eight key sectors, and even the fastest growing segments are not unscathed.

XSLT Processing with Java

Since many of the XSLT processors are written in Java, they can be directly invoked from a Java application or servlet. This chapter is devoted to Java and XSLT programming techniques that work for both standalone applications as well as servlets, with a particular emphasis on Sun's Java API for XML Processing (JAXP) API.

Reimagining the Book Publishing World With XML

In order to profit--literally--from the new digital markets, publishers must rethink the way they create, manage, publish, and deliver content. They must re-engineer their processes to create more flexibility and guarantee a sustainable and certain future. They must re-imagine a production process that frees their content to be transformed--on-demand--into whatever new formats, devices, and uses consumers require, now and for the future.

Making Mistakes with XML

Since the first publication of the XML 1.0 Recommendation in 1998, hundreds of applications, data models, document formats, tools, specifications, libraries, references, tutorials, books, papers, excitement, enthusiasm, and energy have exploded onto the scene, making this relatively simple idea one of the most important developments in the computer industry since the microprocessor. But, it's not always been a smooth ride. It's just as easy to misuse and abuse XML as it is to get it right. In this article, I discuss what I feel are the top ten mistakes you can make with XML.

Collaborative Information Seeking in Intercultural Computer-Mediated Communication Groups: Testing the Influence of Social Context Using Social Network Analysis

This article examines the process of collaborative information seeking in intercultural computer-mediated communication (CMC) groups. The authors conducted a field experiment in which 86 students from three distant universities (one in the United States, two in Singapore) participated. The students participated in a collaborative learning practice in which they socially recommended information using a CMC system. The results demonstrate that the social context—that is, preexisting social networks, groups, and intergroup boundaries—significantly constrained the flow of information across intercultural CMC groups. The authors also found that the influence of the social context on CMC collaboration could be moderated by other contingent factors such as national culture and individuals' outcome expectancies of Internet use. The authors present the results from testing their hypotheses using multivariate p* and Quadratic Assignment Procedure network regression analyses and conclude with a discussion of the findings and implications for future research.

Did You See It Coming? Effects of the Specificity and Efficiency of Goal Pursuit on the Accuracy and Onset of Goal Detection in Social Interaction

To test aspects of a theoretical framework on goal detection in social interaction, an experiment examined dyadic initial interactions wherein one participant pursued a goal unbeknownst to another participant. The level of specificity and efficiency at which a pursuer sought a goal interacted to affect the accuracy of the detector's inference as well as the time of onset for that inference. Consistent with hypotheses, efficiency was unrelated to accuracy and negatively correlated with onset latency when pursuers had an abstract information-seeking goal, whereas efficiency was positively correlated with accuracy and onset latency when detecting a concrete (i.e., specific) information-seeking goal. Unexpectedly, efficiency was unrelated to accuracy and onset latency for a midlevel information-seeking goal. Other results focused on the role of individual differences (i.e., perspective-taking and suspicion in others' motives) and perceived communication competence in the goal detection process. A more controlled, second experiment that employed confederates generally replicated results.

The Interlanguage Grammar of Information Management in L1 and L2 Developing Writing

In the tradition of work by Shaughnessy (1977) and Bartholomae (1980) applying concepts from second language acquisition research to developing writing, we explore the commonalities of L1 and L2 writers on the specific level of linguistic choices needed to order information within and across sentence boundaries. We propose that many of the kinds of constructions in L1 and L2 writing most difficult to categorize, labeled as errors, are in structures that are, from the writers’ perspective, principled attempts to meet their obligation of managing information. We examine 90 essays written by college students, 60 by native speakers, and 30 by nonnative speakers, and identify 360 non-target-like structures that are attempts to manage information. There are similarities in number and type of these constructions used by L1 and L2 developing writers.

How to Substitute Your Custom CSS When Using DITA Open Toolkit Transforms

When you want to use the DITA Open Toolkit transforms but you want to use your own CSS, here's how to substitute your CSS for HTML Help (CHM).

A Watched Folder for Publishing from DITA Source Files

This post describes creating a watched folder that runs DITA transforms on content that is copied into the folder on a shared server. It also gives instructions for using this "transform engine" to output both PDF and CHM files using the default DITA Open Toolkit transform files. I devised this set up so that we could test our prototypes while we model our existing content, and I wanted to share it with others who are getting started with DITA on a small scale.

Quick and Rude Guide to DITA - Part 2 of 3

In Part 1 of this series, I said DITA was about chunks and tags, and asked you to look at this user guide. My aim was to get you thinking in terms of topic types ("Hey, this table is a reference, what's it doing in the middle of a task topic"). In this post, I'll talk of writing your first DITA topic.

Expanded Information Retrieval Using Full-Text Searching

The value of full text for expanding information retrieval was examined. Two full-text databases were used: Textpresso for neuroscience and ScienceDirect. Queries representing different categories were used to search different text fields (titles, abstracts, full text and, where possible, keywords). Searching the full-text field relative to the commonly used abstracts field increases retrievals by one or more orders of magnitude, depending on the categories selected. For phenomena-type categories (e.g. blood flow, thermodynamic equilibrium, etc.), retrievals are enhanced by about an order of magnitude. For infrastructure-type categories (e.g. equipment types, sponsors, suppliers, databases, etc.), retrievals are enhanced by well over an order of magnitude, and sometimes multiple orders of magnitude. Use of combination terms along with proximity specification capability is a very powerful feature for retrieving relevant records from full-text searching, and can be useful for applications like literature-related discovery.

Building a Taxonomy of a Firm’s Knowledge Assets: A Perspective of Durability and Profitability

Managing their knowledge assets is an imperative issue for most organizations in pursuit of competitive advantage in the knowledge-based economy. Previous researchers have proposed a number of valuable taxonomies for classifying an organization’s knowledge assets. However, once knowledge assets are classified by such taxonomies as a particular type, they do not change type over time. Arguably, however, business contexts are swiftly changing, and knowledge assets may have to be constantly adapted to play new roles, and so a taxonomy capable of reflecting the changing relations between knowledge assets and environmental conditions is needed. This article proposes such a taxonomy which utilizes durability and profitability as dimensions. This taxonomy allows knowledge assets to change type in the light of the new condition. Additionally, it has the characteristics of demonstrating the alignment of assets with organizational strategies, and of being widely applicable in the for-profit sector.

Representing and Sharing Folksonomies with Semantics

Websites that provide content creation and sharing features have become quite popular recently. These sites allow users to categorize and browse content using ‘tags’ or free-text keyword topics. Since users contribute and tag social media content across a variety of social web platforms, creating new knowledge from distributed tag data has become a matter of performing various tasks, including publishing, aggregating, integrating, and republishing tag data. However, there are a number of issues in relation to data sharing and interoperability when processing tag data across heterogeneous tagging platforms. In this paper we introduce a semantic tag model that aims to explicitly offer the necessary structure, semantics and relationships between tags. This approach provides an improved opportunity for representing tag data in the form of reusable constructs at a semantic level. We also demonstrate a prototype that consumes and makes use of shared tag metadata across heterogeneous sources.

Relationships Between Knowledge Acquisition, Absorptive Capacity and Innovation Capability: An Empirical Study on Taiwan’s Financial and Manufacturing Industries

This study investigates the relationships between knowledge acquisition, absorptive capability, and innovation capability on Taiwan’s knowledge-intensive industries using a structural equation model, which is constructed based on the data sampled from financial and manufacturing industries, and the 362 returned valid research samples. By testing five hypotheses, the research results find that absorptive capacity is the mediator between knowledge acquisition and innovation capability, and that knowledge acquisition has a positive effect on absorptive capacity. In addition, we used a multi-group approach and found that industry is a moderator between knowledge acquisition and innovation capability. Finally, a conclusion including research findings, discussion, implication, and future works is presented.

A New Enhancement to the R-Tree Node Splitting

The performance of spatial queries depends mainly on the underlying index structure used to handle them. R-tree, a well-known spatial index structure, suffers largely from high overlap and high coverage resulting mainly from splitting the overflowed nodes. Assigning the remaining entries to the underflow node in order to meet the R-tree minimum fill constraint (Remaining Entries problem) may induce high overlap or high coverage. This is done without considering the geometric features of the remaining entries and this may cause a very non-optimized expansion of that particular node. This paper presents a solution to the above problem. The proposed solution to this problem distributes rectangles as follows: (1) assign m entries to the first node, which are nearest to the first seed; (2) assign other m entries to the second node, which are nearest to the second seed; (3) assign the remaining entries one by one to the nearest seed. Several experiments on real data, as well as synthetic data, show that the proposed splitting algorithm outperforms the efficient version of the original R-tree in terms of query performance.

The Ethic of Exigence: Information Design, Postmodern Ethics, and the Holocaust

Compared to ethics in technical writing, ethics in design has received less attention. This lack of attention grows more apparent as document design becomes ‘‘information design.’’ Since Katz discerned an ‘‘ethic of expediency’’ in Nazi technical writing, scholars have often framed technical communication ethics in categorical terms. Yet analyses of information design must consider why arrangements of text and graphics have symbolic potency for given cultures. An ‘‘ethic of exigence’’ can be seen in an example of Nazi information design, a 1935 racial-education poster that illustrates how designers and users co-constructed a communally validated meaning. This example supports the postmodern view that ethics must account for naturalized authority as well as individual actions.

From Information Development to Knowledge Development

The world, particularly the ITC world, is abuzz with the term "knowledge sharing." Most of us thoroughly agree that knowledge must be shared. Often, the sharing is viewed only in the context of the product development teams. However, what about the users? We, the technical communicators, information developers, or whatever we prefer to call ourselves, are supposed to help our users in using our products efficiently. So, I guess we are the ones responsible to share our knowledge with the users.

Writing My First DITA-Ready Topic

Using DITA actually makes your procedures concise and useful. You no longer have to worry about what fits and what doesn’t. Breaking your procedures into the various DITA elements helps you see whether certain information needs to be added, moved, or deleted. And then suddenly, when you begin to write procedures, you automatically start adding, deleting, and moving information around like you need to do with DITA. Before you know it, DITA has already changed the way your procedures look. So how do you get started?

Using Bullet Points and Lists

Bullet points are a popular tool when writing e-mails, memos, and letters. Business writers know they draw attention to important information. Readers like bullet points because they are visually appealing and make it easy to quickly find pertinent information.

Quick and Rude Guide to DITA

DITA is an architecture. It is a collection of design principles that: is inclined heavily towards self-sufficient information modules; lets its basics to be inherited into derived classes; borrows its tags from HTML and XHTML.

Getting To Know XML Tutorials

Unlike some other software technologies such as HTML or even Java, XML is a little fuzzier in terms of how it is applied in different scenarios.

Creating XML Documents

Similar to HTML, XML is a technology that is best understood by working with it.

Digging Deeper Into XML Documents

This tutorial introduces you to a few more acronyms, and along the way takes a closer look at the inner workings of XML documents. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to document your XML code with comments.

DITA Applications: Using Topics for Narrative Documents

DITA is applicable to many publishing applications, including traditional narrative documents that don't seem, at first look, like candidates for ditification.

DITA, Metadata Maturity and the Case for Taxonomy

Many organizations have turned to component-oriented content creation to create more sophisticated knowledge products, in more languages, and at lower cost. Our research shows that organizations that use XML authoring are more mature than their peers with respect to the adoption of best practices for search and metadata. However, the use of native DITA metadata capabilities is rare, and many are also missing out on opportunities to use taxonomy for content reuse and improved content findability. This article examines the metadata capabilities within DITA (and content management systems), discusses two major benefits that can be achieved by using descriptive metadata and taxonomy, and recommends some best practices for getting started with metadata for component-oriented content.

XML Implementation Flow Chart

A PDF flowchart of questions one should answer when choosing XML implementation plans.

More Like This: A Design Pattern

This month, we’ll explore the simple, but very powerful design pattern called More Like This, which provides the information scent and motivation necessary to make customers navigational decisions quick, easy, and intuitive. Unfortunately, most sites do not make sufficient use of this pattern and some that do use it design and implement it incorrectly.

Only the Good Die Young

Enterprises looking to fast track their content strategy and minimize the risks of a big-bang initiative are choosing DITA–one of the most popular information models to suit today’s content–rich, multi-channel environment.

How Much Information? 2009 Report on American Consumers

In 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day. A zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes. These estimates are from an analysis of more than 20 different sources of information, from very old (newspapers and books) to very new (portable computer games, satellite radio, and Internet video). Information at work is not included.

Defining Data With DTD Schemas

In this tutorial, you'll learn: how XML allows you to create custom markup languages; the role of schemas in XML data modeling; the difference between the types of XML schemas; what constitutes valid and well-formed documents; how to declare elements and attributes in a DTD; and how to create and use a DTD for a custom markup language.

Extend Enumerated Lists in an XML Schema

The addition of new values to a list is a common and necessary requirement. Schema designers often seek to build into the architecture a means to permit additional values that were unknown at design time. How can schema designers create an enumerated value list that is extensible and easy to implement? Discover several approaches used to achieve this goal.

Schema-Aware Processing with XSLT 2.0

With the release of version 2.0, XSLT now allows you to design your stylesheets to be schema-aware. A schema-aware XSLT system offers many benefits, including the ability to validate input trees prior to the XSLT transformation to ensure that the XSLT stylesheet only processes valid input, as well as the ability to validate output trees to ensure that the XSLT transformation is producing the valid XML output. You are also able to specify data types for variables, for input parameters for user-defined functions and templates, and for return values from the functions. In this article, learn more about the concept of schema-aware facilities and follow some examples that illustrate the benefits.

Ten XML Schemas You Should Know

In this article, look at some top XML schemas that provide solutions for all sorts of problems, from the basics of Web services to data description. You'll also cover database-like solutions that involve contacts and invoices. The schemas in this article were chosen for their usefulness and utility, plus their impact on the XML community in how information is shared and exchanged using the XML format.

Structured Authoring for Everyone

While the concepts of structured authoring are more than just slightly useful for technical writing, they can be beneficial for just about any writing task within an organization. Think about all of the documents that you’ve read on the job and how structured, or not, they were.

Reuse: Today's Best Practice

DITA 101: Fundamentals of DITA for Authors and Managers (2009), by Ann Rockley, Steve Manning, and Charles Cooper, explains the open XML standard “that defines a common structure for content that promotes the consistent creation, sharing, and reuse of content.” According to Scott Abel, the book is “simple, easy to understand, and loaded with practical examples.” Provides a link to a free chapter, for your review.

A Short Tutorial on WSDL

Web Services Description Language is the standard format for describing a web service in XML format. In this tutorial you will learn what is WSDL and Why and How to use it. WSDL is very easy to learn and very important for Web Services.

A Small Tutorial on SOAP

SOAP is a simple and open standard XML-based protocol for exchanging information between computers. In this tutorial you will learn what is SOAP and Why and How to use it. SOAP is very easy to learn and to use and in demand too.

Data Services Components And XML Tutorials

In this tutorial, we will look at data services components. Recall that data services components are used to exchange business information with business partners, integrate data from other systems, and store and retrieve business data. We'll examine two Microsoft technologies that can be used to build data services components that can perform these tasks.

DTD Tutorial

DTD is described in XML 1.0 standard. In this tutorial basic DTD features are demonstrated on many examples.

DTD в примерах

DTD описан в стандарте XML 1.0. В этом руководстве на множестве примеров демонстрируются основные правила DTD.

DTD Tutorial

DTD está descrito en XML 1.0 standard. En este tutorial se muestran las características básicas de una DTD a través de ejemplos.

PHP: Using XML

The tasks behind using XML are always the same: reading data from XML and writing data into it. So this chapter focuses on these tasks and shows how to implement them.

XQuery Update

XQuery, the query language for XML, can be used to modify XML. In this article, learn about the various ways to modify XML, including XML stored in memory or in a DB2® pureXML™ database. Explore the different ways to modify XML in four different use cases: health care, business, financial derivatives, and information technology, while utilizing DB2 pureXML. Finally, examine guidelines for when to use XQuery to perform either sub-document updates or full document replacement and versioning of the stored XML.

Querying XML Data With XQuery

The idea behind that quote is that XQuery is like a jacked up version of XPath with a little XSLT sprinkled in for good measure. In other words, XQuery is a technology that packs some punch when it comes to drilling deep into XML data and extracting exactly the data in which you're interested. This tutorial introduces you to XQuery and shows you some practical ways to put the language to use with your own XML code.

Structure Of An XML Document Tutorials

The structure of an XML document can be defined by two standards. The first standard is the XML specification, which defines the default rules for building all XML documents. Any XML document that meets the basic rules as defined by the XML specification is called a well-formed XML document. An XML document can be checked to determine whether it is well formed—that is, whether the document has the correct structure (syntax).

Locate Specific Sections of Your XML Documents with XPath, Part 1

XML is a data format concerned primarily with compatibility and flexibility. But as useful as XML is, it's limited without the abilities to find specific portions of a document quickly and to filter and selectively locate data within a document. XPath provides the ability to easily reference specific text, elements, and attributes within a document—and with a fairly low learning curve. Additionally, XPath is key to many other XML vocabularies and technologies, such as XSL and XQuery. This tutorial will teach you the fundamentals of XPath, including all of its various selectors and semantics, in an example-driven and hands-on manner.

Writing XML data to the File System with SSIS

This article shows how you may retrieve XML data from a relational database and write it to a folder on your file system as a text or xml file using Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services 2008.

Social Networks and Extending the User Profile in Drupal: Part 2

Builds upon Part 1 of this article. The Content Profile module creates a new content type called Profile when it is enabled. By default, this content type is set to be used as a profile. We need to complete a few additional steps to make our profile fully functional.

Using and Abusing XML

By adopting XML, we can take advantage of the scores of tools that work on arbitrary XML documents. Common tasks, like editing, validation, transformations, and queries, are then just a matter of selecting and applying the right tool. Also, we can then apply the experience we gain with these tools on other documents we come across in our work.

XML Abstraction at the Wrong Level

Over the last month I've encountered two applications that use XML at the wrong level of abstraction. Instead of tailoring the schema to their needs, they use a very abstract schema, and encode their elements at a meta level within the XML data. This approach hinders the verification and manipulation of the corresponding XML files. The two culrpits I have identified are the iTunes digital jukebox, and the Dia drawing program.

Drinking or Drowning in the Information Confluence

Data given context is information, and information put to use is knowledge. With that definition, the idea that more and better access to all forms of information does not necessarily mean we are getting more and better knowledge to help us through our daily lives. With real knowledge as the goal, independent information sources need to be united to provide better comprehension of the world around us. Knowledge that instills a higher level of organization and understanding of topics relevant to our lives is the ultimate goal. It’s not the quantity of information, but the quality of the knowledge that we need.

The Real-Time Web: A Primer, Part 1

This deconstruction of content is not limited to Twitter. The movement to expose underlying data and make it more actionable is gaining momentum across industries and platforms. One example is the move to report financial data in XBRL format (eXtensible Business Reporting Language). Another is the growing use of microformats and RDFa, which are small patterns of HTML that represent data on commonly published subjects on Web pages, such as people, events, blog topics, reviews, and tags. Twitter's character limit and accessibility, however, are the simplest and most recognized example of how elements of connected data can provide value both individually and in aggregate.

Fixing Enterprise Architecture: Balancing the Forces of Change in the Modern Organization

There's long been something fairly unsatisfying about the relationship that enterprise architecture has had with the business side of most organizations. Recently there's a growing realization that traditional enterprise architecture as its often practiced today might be broken in some important way. What might be wrong and how to fix it are the questions du jour.

Information Strategy Pyramid

Consistency is an important part of communication, even at the simplest level of having a common terminology, using the same words consistently throughout a document helps the reader learn. Take this idea up a level, from a single document to a number of documents and maintaining the same terminology across all documents can further help re-enforce the messaging and aid learning, and should give the reader a level of comfort that the entire set of information has been thought of, and delivered, as a cohesive set.

LaTeX, Content, and Structure

Structure is a key component to anything that you write. In this blog post, Scott Nesbitt discusses the importance of structure in the context of using the LaTeX typesetting language.

Wicked Problems and SharePoint: Rethinking the Approach

SharePoint can neither create nor destroy organizational chaos, but does an excellent job of reflecting the level of organizational chaos that existed at the time of deployment. The “SharePoint paradox” and paths to SharePoint wickedness. The power of Issue Mapping and IBIS based collaboration. How to leverage the best of SharePoint and Issue Mapping.

Get Smart With SharePoint Documents

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.

SharePoint 2010 Navigation Hierarchies and Key Filters

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."

Top Five Best Database Management Tools

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.

An XML Experiment Fizzles

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.

What Information Developers Can Learn from Software Developers

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?

DITA for the Impatient

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).

Word 2007: Using Quick Tables

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.

Defining Information Architecture

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.

Cos’è l’architettura dell’informazione

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.

Connecting the Dots of User Experience

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.

Towards an Architectural Document Analysis

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.

Journal of Information Architecture

The Journal of Information Architecture is an international peer-reviewed scholarly journal. Its aim is to facilitate the systematic development of the scientific body of knowledge in the field of information architecture.

On Uncertainty in Information Architecture

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.

The Machineries of Context

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.

Workshop on Personal Photo Libraries

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.

Jeff Parks

A weblog/podcast by an Information Architect living and working in Ottawa, Ontario.

Rearchitecting a Small Software Company's Information

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.

Concept, Task, Reference: A Practical Guide to Choosing the Right Topic Type

This presentation is for beginning to intermediate users of DITA. It's based on my experience with projects on which I'm project manager, information architect, and writer.

Indexing Effectively in DITA

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.

Structured Authoring and DITA

What does structured authoring mean to you? Structured authoring is a publishing workflow that lets you define and enforce consistent organization of information in documents, whether printed or online. What it means to me: defining a goal and assembling architected topics to help the reader achieve that goal.

XBRL, Semantic Web Technologies Complement Each Other

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.

DITA 1.2 Feature Description: Glossary and Terminology Specialization

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.

Information Architecture Essentials

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.

Breaking Up Large Documents for the Web - Part 1

To present content on the web in the amount that most people want: think “topic,” not “book”; break large documents into topics and subtopics.

Breaking Up Large Documents for the Web - Part 2

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?

Designing the Total User Experience: Implications for Research and Program Development

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.

Just Put That In The Zip Code Field: The Ins and Outs of Content Modeling

How closely does the content in your CMS resemble the logical content you planned on? # Different systems have vastly different content modeling.

What is Intelligent Content? And Why Won’t Scott Abel Shut Up About It?

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.

Content Curation: A Manifesto

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.

Manifesto For The Content Curator: The Next Big Social Media Job Of The Future?

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.

Cafe con Leche: XML News and Resources

A blog about XML theory and XML applications.

Swivel

Swivel's mission is to make data useful. Compare data from multiple sources. Sort and filter data according to simple criteria. Map geographical data. Plot pie, bar, scatter and line graphs. Download data into a spreadsheet for analysis.

Catalyzing Innovation and Knowledge Sharing

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.

Ethics and Information

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.

Securing Information Assets

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?

Making the Complex Simple

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.

Marketing of Library and Information Products and Services

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.

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.

Good Interaction Designers Borrow, Great Ones Steal...

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.

Information Overload: Conversation with Ricardo Amigo

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.

Converting to XML: Is it Always the Answer?

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.

Alternatives to XML: Keeping Down your Document Conversion Costs

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.

Inside Out: Interaction Design for Augmented Reality

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.