Information architecture

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Information architecture (IA) is the structural design of shared information environments; the art and science of organizing and labelling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability and findability; and an emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design, architecture and information science to the digital landscape. [1] Typically, it involves a model or concept of information that is used and applied to activities which require explicit details of complex information systems. These activities include library systems and database development.

Contents

Definition

Information architecture has somewhat different meanings in different branches of information systems or information technology:

  1. The structural design of shared information environments. [2] :4
  2. The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities, and software to support findability and usability. [1] [3]
  3. An emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape. [2] :4 [4]
  4. The combination of organization, labeling, search and navigation systems within websites and intranets. [2] :4
  5. Extracting required parameters/data of Engineering Designs in the process of creating a knowledge-base linking different systems and standards.
  6. A blueprint and navigational aid to the content of information-rich systems. [5]
  7. A subset of data architecture where usable data (a.k.a. information) is constructed in and designed or arranged in a fashion most useful or empirically holistic to the users of this data.
  8. The practice of organizing the information / content / functionality of a web site so that it presents the best user experience it can, with information and services being easily usable and findable (as applied to web design and development). [6]
  9. The conceptual framework surrounding information, providing context, awareness of location and sustainable structure.

Debate

The difficulty in establishing a common definition for "information architecture" arises partly from the term's existence in multiple fields. In the field of systems design, for example, information architecture is a component of enterprise architecture that deals with the information component when describing the structure of an enterprise.

While the definition of information architecture is relatively well-established in the field of systems design, it is much more debatable within the context of online information (i.e., websites). Andrew Dillon refers to the latter as the "big IA–little IA debate". [7] In the little IA view, information architecture is essentially the application of information science to web design which considers, for example, issues of classification and information retrieval. In the big IA view, information architecture involves more than just the organization of a website; it also factors in user experience, thereby considering usability issues of information design.

Notable people in information architecture

See also

Related Research Articles

Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an information need. The information need can be specified in the form of a search query. In the case of document retrieval, queries can be based on full-text or other content-based indexing. Information retrieval is the science of searching for information in a document, searching for documents themselves, and also searching for the metadata that describes data, and for databases of texts, images or sounds.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Intranet</span> Network of private resources in an organization

An intranet is a computer network for sharing information, easier communication, collaboration tools, operational systems, and other computing services within an organization, usually to the exclusion of access by outsiders. The term is used in contrast to public networks, such as the Internet, but uses the same technology based on the Internet protocol suite.

A web portal is a specially designed website that brings information from diverse sources, like emails, online forums and search engines, together in a uniform way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displaying information ; often, the user can configure which ones to display. Variants of portals include mashups and intranet dashboards for executives and managers. The extent to which content is displayed in a "uniform way" may depend on the intended user and the intended purpose, as well as the diversity of the content. Very often design emphasis is on a certain "metaphor" for configuring and customizing the presentation of the content and the chosen implementation framework or code libraries. In addition, the role of the user in an organization may determine which content can be added to the portal or deleted from the portal configuration.

A conceptual schema or conceptual data model is a high-level description of informational needs underlying the design of a database. It typically includes only the core concepts and the main relationships among them. This is a high-level model with insufficient detail to build a complete, functional database. It describes the structure of the whole database for a group of users. The conceptual model is also known as the data model that can be used to describe the conceptual schema when a database system is implemented. It hides the internal details of physical storage and targets the description of entities, datatypes, relationships and constraints.

Enterprise information integration (EII) is the ability to support a unified view of data and information for an entire organization. In a data virtualization application of EII, a process of information integration, using data abstraction to provide a unified interface for viewing all the data within an organization, and a single set of structures and naming conventions to represent this data; the goal of EII is to get a large set of heterogeneous data sources to appear to a user or system as a single, homogeneous data source.

REST is a software architectural style that was created to guide the design and development of the architecture for the World Wide Web. REST defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of a distributed, Internet-scale hypermedia system, such as the Web, should behave. The REST architectural style emphasises uniform interfaces, independent deployment of components, the scalability of interactions between them, and creating a layered architecture to promote caching to reduce user-perceived latency, enforce security, and encapsulate legacy systems.

Findability is the ease with which information contained on a website can be found, both from outside the website and by users already on the website. Although findability has relevance outside the World Wide Web, the term is usually used in that context. Most relevant websites do not come up in the top results because designers and engineers do not cater to the way ranking algorithms work currently. Its importance can be determined from the first law of e-commerce, which states "If the user can’t find the product, the user can’t buy the product." As of December 2014, out of 10.3 billion monthly Google searches by Internet users in the United States, an estimated 78% are made to research products and services online.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Morville</span>

Peter Morville is president of Semantic Studios, an information architecture and findability consulting firm. He may be best known as an influential figure and "founding father" of information architecture, having coauthored the best-selling book in the discipline, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. For over a decade, he has advised such clients as AT&T, Dow Chemical, Ford, the IMF, the Library of Congress, and Microsoft. Morville was a co-founder and past president of the Information Architecture Institute, and has served on their advisory board. He delivers keynotes and seminars at international events, and his work has been featured in major publications, including Business Week, Fortune, and The Wall Street Journal.

Louis B. Rosenfeld is an American information architect, consultant, author and publisher, known as co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eric Reiss</span> American information architect

Eric Reiss is an American business and information architecture theorist, consultant and author, known for his work in the field of information architecture, usability, and service design. In 2010, he was named in a blog as "One of the Top 10 European Content Strategists to Watch". In 2019 he sued the Information Architecture Institute following being asked to step down due to multiple accusations of sexual harassment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Website wireframe</span> Visual guide that represents the skeletal framework of a website

A website wireframe, also known as a page schematic or screen blueprint, is a visual guide that represents the skeletal framework of a website. The term wireframe is taken from other fields that use a skeletal framework to represent 3 dimensional shape and volume. Wireframes are created for the purpose of arranging elements to best accomplish a particular purpose. The purpose is usually driven by a business objective and a creative idea. The wireframe depicts the page layout or arrangement of the website's content, including interface elements and navigational systems, and how they work together. The wireframe usually lacks typographic style, color, or graphics, since the main focus lies in functionality, behavior, and priority of content. In other words, it focuses on what a screen does, not what it looks like. Wireframes can be pencil drawings or sketches on a whiteboard, or they can be produced by means of a broad array of free or commercial software applications. Wireframes are generally created by business analysts, user experience designers, developers, visual designers, and by those with expertise in interaction design, information architecture and user research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Web content</span> Content encountered as part of the user experience on websites

Web content is the text, visual or audio content that is made available online and user encountered as part of the online usage and experience on websites. It may include text, images, sounds and audio, online videos, among other items placed within web pages.

The Information Architecture Institute was a non-profit volunteer organization dedicated to advancing and promoting information architecture. The organization was incorporated in November 2002 and was a 501(c)(6) organization. It grew to become one of the world's largest professional groups for web specialists, with over 1200 members in 60 countries, It was dissolved in September 2019 and is no longer a professional board of trade.

An enterprise portal, also known as an enterprise information portal (EIP), is a framework for integrating information, people and processes across organizational boundaries in a manner similar to the more general web portals. Enterprise portals provide a secure unified access point, often in the form of a web-based user interface, and are designed to aggregate and personalize information through application-specific portlets.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to business management:

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to technology:

Context-aware computing refers to a general class of mobile systems that can sense their physical environment, and adapt their behavior accordingly.

In computing, logging is the act of keeping a log of events that occur in a computer system, such as problems, errors or just information on current operations. These events may occur in the operating system or in other software. A message or log entry is recorded for each such event. These log messages can then be used to monitor and understand the operation of the system, to debug problems, or during an audit. Logging is particularly important in multi-user software, to have a central overview of the operation of the system.

Business Intelligence 2.0 is a development of the existing business intelligence model that began in the mid-2000s, where data can be obtained from many sources. The process allows for querying real-time corporate data by employees but approaches the data with a web browser-based solution. This is in contrast to previous proprietary querying tools that characterized previous BI software.

Data defined storage is a marketing term for managing, protecting, and realizing value from data by combining application, information and storage tiers.

References

  1. 1 2 "What is IA?" (PDF). Information Architecture Institute. Archived from the original (PDF) on 28 July 2021.
  2. 1 2 3 Morville & Rosenfeld 2007.
  3. Morville & Rosenfeld (2000). p. 4. "The art and science of shaping information products and experienced to support usability and findability."
  4. Resmini, A. & Rosati, L. (2012). A Brief History of Information Architecture. Journal of Information Architecture. Vol. 3, No. 2. [Available at http://journalofia.org/volume3/issue2/03-resmini/]. Originally published in Resmini, A. & Rosati L. (2011). Pervasive Information Architecture. Morgan Kaufmann. (Edited by the authors).
  5. Toms, Elaine (17 May 2012). "Information interaction: Providing a framework for information architecture". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 53 (10.1002/asi.10094): 855–862. doi:10.1002/asi.10094.
  6. "Information Architecture". Mozilla Developer Network. 8 June 2023.
  7. Dillon, A (2002). "Information Architecture in JASIST: Just where did we come from?". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 53 (10): 821–23. doi:10.1002/asi.10090..

Bibliography

Further reading