[Sigia-l] I Want My GUT of Information Architecture!

[Nuno Lopes]

So do I but I'm afraid it is not feasible at the moment. It seams that
the specialists can't really settle on witch facet of Information the
discipline tries to grasp and master, and if all quite often I get
confused on what is being actually referenced as "structure" in their
comments. This can be a good thing, but nevertheless confusing.

Information has at least three groups of facets IMHO:

1) Physical Structure
	1.1) Logical Structure (First order Ontologies, Entity
Relationship                         Models, Object Oriented Models,
Object Roles Modelling, etc)
	1.2) Physical Representation (Data)
		1.2.1) Structured
		1.2.2) Semi-structured
		1.2.3) Unstructured

2) Semantic Structure
	2.1) Logical Structure (formulated over context experience)
	2.2) Communication Structure (formulated towards audiences)

3) Meta Structure
	3.1) Language
	3.2) Cultural Scope

For the first group there is a lot of work done within the realm of IT
and Computer Science. Specialists in this area used to be called Data
Architects.

For the second group, the work is still little and inconsistent has we
don't know what is actually the power of the artifacts being produced
(Topic maps, Taxonomies, Faceted Classification, Second Order Ontologies
etc). Most of the artifacts of the second are even for some Information
Architects not recognized has structuring entities.

The third, spans over the previous two, and probably will be the glue of
joining both but still work is lacking as the people working in 1) and
2) don't actually know the power offered by each other products.

Christina Wodtke on the topic "Findability is dead, Long live ummm...
Meaning?" wrote:

>I have long thought the three qualities an IA should work toward was
>findability, understandability and usability

I think this is the kind of higher level of pragmatics that the field
needs. Knowledge is not about Big IA, Little IA, West Cost IA, East Cost
IA, Information Architects, Data Architect or any other kind of labels,
is about sharing experiences and reasoning. Is about unblocking barriers
that other fields have reached (such as Data Architecture) and at that
at the moment are having difficulty in breaking.

It really puts me of IA, when after reading the comments of different
members about an interesting subject, when it comes to play the pipe
with an example, the fundamental part falls within the scope of the
knowledge of Data Architectures were the data modeled is highly
structured.

But the reason why is highly structured, is not because structure in
this case is good, but because we lack knowledge about creating models
around unstructured data. It was here were I thought it was the play
ground of Information Architecture, and probably is but I'm still not
convinced by the information being exchanged in this list.

Peter Merholz wrote:
>I'm Just Around The Corner from Figuring It Out.

I'm really excited about your solution. Please share if you can.

Best regards,

Nuno Lopes

PS: Like most of us, Physics do hope a lot, but their subject has been
studied for centuries, so if time is of relevance probably we are still
a few 5 or 10 years behind IMHO.