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<<Would anyone be willing to share examples of IA standards currently in

use?  Perhaps if we actually had something to talk about this discussion

would be more interesting. >>

This is not a standard that I used, but one that came up regarding
taxonomies and something that I actually had a brief discussion about on
this list, but it is an example and I think speaks very well to why
standards can be important, more on that later.

I have a taxonomy:

Sports Geography
	East
		baseball[-east]
		football[-east]
		soccer[-east]
		hockey[-east]
		basketball[-east]
	West
		baseball[-west]
		football[-west]
		soccer[-west]
		hockey[-west]
		basketball[-west]
	North
		baseball[-north]
		football[-north]
		soccer[-north]
		hockey[-north]
		basketball[-north]
	South
		baseball[-south]
		football[-south]
		soccer[-south]
		hockey[-south]
		basketball[-south]

The brackets are one version, w/o the brackets is another. Our customers
said the brackets is the standard they deploy with. Why is this
important? B/c if we worked w/ the bracketed standard it meant that we
were going to create a rule to help users support this which would
basically force unique category names across all the taxonomy instead of
unique category names at a container in the taxonomy.

Is uniqueness across a taxonomy a standard? Is it a valuable one? At the
time of the discussion there were mixed opinions on the subject. What
was clear back then was that the value of the standard was not very well
understood, or it's value was based on the assumption of very poor
technology.

Another example of an IA "standard" would be JJG's visual vocabulary. It
is a stencil set for use for making flowcharts with for both content
based and application based situations. Very cool actually. It could be
standardized in an organization so that there is ONE method for doing
flow charting and so that the key for a flowchart can be taught once
instead of constantly re-invented.

Should it be a standard for ALL IAs? No way. Maybe a base or guideline,
but that's about it.

Why are standards important? Or should I say when (at what level of
organization); when interoperability is at stake and that
interoperability derives explicit or implicit efficiencies and value for
that level of organization.

The example I'm facing is Photoshop vs. Fireworks for UI Screen Designs.
Why? B/c they aren't interoperable with each other. PSD or PNG are not
rendered the same nor exposed the same in each app. The PNG layers of a
Fireworks file are lost in PhotoShop, and the foldering of layers in
PhotoShop are lost in Fireworks. One designer likes PSD, another likes
PNG ... What's a manager to do? ... Find a new standard. ;) We are
actually moving to Flash for our prototyping for various reasons. But
this way if a designer gets hit by a truck their assets are not lost on
the rest of the team. 

This speaks best to Ziya's distinction between tools and formats. If
there were proper open formats to achieve what is necessary here, then I
could say, "Cool!" I agree. But there are no open formats that I have
seen that are completely interoperable across the tools that use those
formats.

If we want to talk about tenets or principles or methods again ... Then
I would suggest that documentation needs to be interoperable outside the
organization if we are ever going to have viable and valuable case
studies written so that we can make a discipline gel together here.

Some might say hogwash ... But this is subjective and that is my POV.

-- dave