[Sigia-l] Information-centered Design (was I Want My GUT of Information Arc hitecture!)

[John R. Howe]

>Matthew:
>  > In the future, there will not be these independent brand
>>  sites. There will be *one furniture site* where all the
>>  brands will post their products. Why? Because we consumers
>>  will go there for all the other relevant information,
>>  including reviews, photos, stories, etc. etc.

>Fabrizio:
>This second snippet doesn't sound nice with the rest of your thoughts.
>IM(HHH)O this hyerarchi-mall model is completely outdated. The "nodes"
>of informations you were talking about in the first snippet implies
>something different and more feasable: maybe the concept itself of "web
>site" will fall, and "meta data browsing" (or "semantic navigation" as
>yo may call it) will cancel the idea of web site as a "unit within
>borders". And this is the main reason why we all are dealing with
>connected vocabularies, faceted classification, dublin core metadata and
>stuff.n And thee reason why, to me, you're perfectly right in all your
><crazy radical soapbox speech>.

I agree. It's not about "units within borders"; it's not about 
location. Like the Neuromancer (W. Gibson's) says: "There's no 
'there' there" (or something like that).   And maybe, if all goes 
well, as Berners-Lee et al wrote in "The Semantic Web" (2001) 
[http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00048144-10D2-1C70-84A9809EC588EF21], 
it will indeed be decentralized, XML and RDF are early indicators, 
ontologies will be the main nodes, software agents the go-betweens. 
Along the same line, I think the loud, deep, collectively incoherent, 
multi-directional buzz about controlled vocabularies at the summit, 
the recent "Less Spatiality, More Semantics" thread on this list, the 
darn "Defining the Darn Thing" thread and its monstrous progeny, the 
brief, skittish thread about "information" a while back... all are 
symptoms of our healthy struggle away from the "architect" and toward 
the "information" in the grandiose title we give ourselves.

(Personally, I went to the summit to learn about metadata and left 
feeling as if I had a dozen semantic arrows through my head, a la 
Steve Martin.  I'm still trying to pull them out... obviously)

John Howe, Web Channel Cleaner

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