Category: Information Architecture

I meant to post this a while back. In response to an ongoing blog-driven conversation about content inventories, Lou Rosenfeld wrote about the inherent limitations to a traditional content inventory, in that it represents a snapshot in time of what is, often, a moving target. Instead, he proposes the idea of a rolling content inventory:…

Recently the IA Institute list was discussing faceted search interfaces and Rashmi Sinha wrote “Now you can build your very own faceted metadata navigation system based on Flamenco Download (thank Marti Hearst, not me. I have not worked on Flamenco in a little while).” Flamenco was developed at SIMS (UC Berkeley). Sinha, who was involved…

A while back I posted an entry here about Uzanto’s MindCanvas, an application for doing user research. A week or so ago, Cody Burleson of IBM Global Business Services posted a link to the IA Institute members mailing list about a web-based card sorting product called Websort. I haven’t tried it out, but it looks…

Did you know the W3C has a standard for taxonomies and other classification schemes (Simple Knowledge Organisation System)? Neither did I. But apparently, Jay Fienberg did, since he just mentioned it on the IA Institute mailing list. I doubt it would be of any use in communicating with clients, but I wonder if it might…

Leisa Reichelt, a Digital Experience Architect, writes Why you shouldn’t start IA with a Content Inventory at her blog, disambiguity. This has spurred an interesting debate in blogs and mailing lists, with a response at Donna Maurer’s blog and further discussion elsewhere (read the comments on the blogs for more). Naturally, once the rhetoric has…

Rosenfeld and Morville have posted the results of their first two surveys toward a new edition of their seminal Polar Bear Book. (My responses to the first survey were noted in this entry here at Extra! Extra!)