[Sigia-l] Taxonomy/Classification IA and Enterprise IA

[Donna M. Fritzsche]

At 10:00 AM -0800 3/19/03, Chiara Fox wrote:
>Hi Donna-
>
>Yes and more. By "Enterprise IA" I am referring to information
>architecture(s) that is/are embraced by the entire organization (be that a
>company, univeristy, whatever). It goes beyond just what they are doing on
>the website to include the extranet, intranet, department databases,
>advertising and print marketing, and more.
>
>Enterprise IA can take a lot of different forms. It could be a basic set
>of metadata attributes that is used by all departments (HR to User Support
>to Financials) on their intranet sites. It could be a standard product
>vocabulary that all departments use. It could be guidelines on how to
>use/implement global, local, contextual, and supplemental navigation
>company-wide. It could take many forms.


Hi Chiara,
Thanks for the detailed explanation of what you mean by "Enterprise IA".
I agree with you and others that it is an important yet difficult process.  In addition to some of the internal business challenges to overcome, there will also be challenges presented by preexisting industry standards (for instance, chemical industry terminology & coding vs pharmaceutical world terminology & coding ..etc).  While often similar, they are rarely the same and mapping conventions will need to be created so that preexisting applications can continue to work.

As you mention, some of this can be handled by creating standard enterprise-wide metadata attributes paired with controlled vocabularies and the intelligent use of  synonyms, etc.

Some of it can be overcome by creating modular attribute groupings.  For instance, the following paper represents some methodologies that might be used to overcome the varied applications that exist within the same company but that require different sets of metadata attributes and controlled vocabularies:

Application profiles: mixing and matching metadata schemas
by Rachel Heery and Manjula Patel
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/app-profiles/intro.html

Heery and Patel discuss a very modular approach.  This architecture could handle a variety of situations, both from a technical perspective and a business/pragmatic perspective.  Does anyone on the list have experience with this approach? I would love to talk to them about it or hear if it was successful.

Finally, there will be times when, due to historic reasons, business reasons or the nature of the users and content  itself, - that attribute and vocabulary sets wont  map to each other in a simple manner.  There have been some proposals on how to handle these mappings intelligently - I don't have the links right now, but I will try to find them. (I think they were called attribute bridges?). (I'm not talking about topic maps - there are some good ideas there, but I also think some problems - just my opinion, not ready to defend it at the moment.)

Thanks for your insights and thought provoking ideas-

Donna M. Fritzsche
Partner
Amichi, LLC
www.amichi.info
donnamarie at amichi.info
(773) 680-2188