[Sigia-l] Fwd: Defining "classification", "metadata", IA, ...

[Andrew McNaughton]

On Sat, 5 Oct 2002, Richard Wiggins wrote:

> Here's a paragraph from a recent article on site design:
>
> "First, a little background. Classification (taxonomy) is a type of
> metadata. The purpose of metadata is to provide essential information about
> a document. Metadata and classification are part of the discipline of
> information architecture, whose focus is to organize and lay out
> content."
>
> After reading that over a few times, I still can't make sense of it.  Here's
> my question:  How would you rewrite the paragraph to make sense to a
> potential client or to your management?   Can classification, taxonomy,
> metadata, and IA all be described in, say, 200 words?

I think I've seen this one before.  Certainly the confusion of
classification with taxonomy is familiar.

I'll have a shot at some definitions.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Classification (v): The assignation of objects (eg documents)  to one or
more pre-determined classes (eg subject groupings).

Taxonomy (n): An organisation of classes, such that classes are contained
within one another in a hierarchical fashion.

Metadata(n): A term used in many disciplines which refers simply to data
about data.  In the context of Information Architecture this is usually
assumed to concern descriptions of documents, typically resembling the
descriptions found in a library card catalog.

Information Architecture (n): A conveniently vague term under which
a variety of disciplines meet to address the problems of organising large
ammounts of information on the web.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

While I think the above definition of IA is fairly accurate, it really
doesn't say very much.  It probably should have a nod to Tufte's
definition of IA in there, but I'm not particularly familiar with his
writings.

I'm not sure whether this set of terms should be introduced together.
Classification, taxonomy and metadata might be introduced in a discussion
of organisational strategies for site content, but I wouldn't try to
introduce IA in the same passage unless it was considerably longer.
Unless you had space to address a few other aspects of IA, you'd wind up
giving a rather lopsided view.

Andrew