[Sigia-l] Site map generator?

[Livia Labate]

 >> a tool cannot determine or infer structure.
 > Why do you say that?

I often get this question after people are surprised I can't do a 
content inventory in 30 minutes.

The relationships that can be inferred from a spidering/clustering tool 
can range from the very basics (with tools like Xenu), based on folder 
structure, to more complex relationships (with tools that do clustering 
analysis, etc). But they are mostly dumb tools, they just follows links. 
And that's fine if what you want to assess is basic "structure".

Although folder structure CAN reflect exactly what the content structure 
is, I find that most of the time that is not the case (if the site has 
more than 20 pages you can bet on it). To infer non-explicit 
relationships between pieces of content is NOT to look at the content 
structure, it's to look at the content organization.

Structure and Organization are different things, though intimately 
intertwined. Content organization is about how each piece of content 
realates to each other and to the whole. Content structure describes in 
which bucket each piece of content sits in (which doesn't necessarily 
express organization).

All this to say that when I do a content inventory I'm interested in the 
content organization (along with other attributes) - content structure 
generaly surfaces during the discovery process, but expecting a tool to 
do both things is just silly.