[Sigia-l] Serious Discussion of IA Research?

[Piet Kopka]

One more about "Info vs. Data".

For a current project we felt it was more important than ever to come to a 
very clear set of well defined terms. We decided to try to translate the 
terms we read all day in the commonly used language of the internet and 
most publications about IA to our native language. That was real fun and 
gave much insights. (We used german, but that is possibly not an important 
point. I hope, that this will also work in english.)

We defined content (Inhalt) as the things which are stored somewhere 
(data). Information - in our definition - is a feeling (?) of clarity which 
must be present (hopefully) while authoring content and should appear when 
someone consumes this content. In short: Content in the maschines, 
informations in the heads. Context is important here. Context could be 
defined as the sum of content presented at a given time.

But we don´t used context as a term. Instead we used the term space (Raum). 
It seems to be appropiate. We were talking about information 
_architecture_. (Please take into account, that in german there is only one 
word for both "space" and "room".)


If you read some asian books about philosophy/religion, you can come to the 
conclusion, that all objects are not so real as you think of them in daily 
life. If you look through a microscope you will have a hard time to get an 
impression of a living room. But you will be able to see other rooms - 
without moving yourself. You only changed your focal distance. So you can 
say a special focal distance let you see special objects (content) which 
gives you the impression of a special (information) space. (It is my 
everyday experience, that i travel through informaion spaces without moving 
much, you can asks my orthopedist.)

These information spaces (rooms) gives you much "context" for further 
thinking. Why not look at the theory of relativity and adopt their effects 
on the examinaton of information spaces. You may also look at the point 
where consistency becomes self-similarity in the examination of spaces 
bubbeling out of other spaces.

Piet