[Sigia-l] More definition?? Ugh. [was IA system components - add to the list!]

[Nuno Lopes]

I can't hold myself of making questions towards the clarification of
things. This is because I believe that this clarification is not only
useful to me but to anyone (including my customers) that is thinking in
hiring or being an Information Architect.

> > If taxonomy development (or navigation to information objects from
> > either a "top down" or "bottom up" approach) isn't an artifact of
> > an information architecture process, what is it an artifact of
> > then? -SC

> "An artifact of a classification process." -BL

It is evident to me that a taxonomy is not an information architecture.
Much as it is evident to me that within the context of a project the
Taxonomist may not be an Information Architect. What it is not evident
to me is that knowing how to use and build taxonomies is not (or should
not be) an artifact of being an Information Architect among others.

So people asking for Information Architects with knowledge of using and
creating taxonomies may not be the case where Information Architects are
confused as Taxonomists but the fact that some (most of us outside the
field) people still don't recon the set of technical abilities of an
Information Architect from its title.

It is not evident to me because taxonomies also deal with the structure
of information, not at the level of its physical shape but of its
meaning. But it is nevertheless a strategy (with its own artifacts) to
approach de specification information structure among others. One can
view a taxonomy and classification systems as a meta shapes of the
semantic structure of information.

> To me, information architecture is the structural specification of a 
> system's information space. - BL

An information architecture is not the structural specification of
information space, but the structure it self. The architects blue prints
are the specification - Architecture: Orderly arrangement of parts;
structure. 

Although I disagree with the way you have put it, I agree to what I
think you want to mean by this.

As you said, Information Architecture is about the structure of
information (or information space as you put it) so for sure knowing how
to create and define taxonomies can't be ignored as an artifact of being
an information architect as it is one approach to tackle information
structure. This is not to say that an Information Architecture does not
have expertise outside the boundaries of Taxonomists as it is required
to be one.

>For example, a news story site may have an information architecture
stating >that every story must include the structural entity News Type.
>
>Meanwhile, a taxonomist may create a scheme for classifying stories so
that >story creators can provide consistent News Type. As the site later
expands >its news coverage, the taxonomist may change the classification
scheme to >reflect the expansion. But that change doesn't alter the
site's information >architecture. - BL

I've never met an information space which structure (at the
interconnection level) does not change when it expands. The structure of
its physical representation and the architecture of the web site in this
context may not change, but the information space changes so does it
structure at the level that matters (information is really a complex
business).

I believe that our main divergence (me an Boniface) is deep in the way
we understand the value of Information Architecture as a field brings on
to the table that witch is considerably different from Software
Architecture. After all, a Web Site is a peace of Software and the
example that you gave exactly falls within the scope of Software
Architecture for decades (so into the roles of a Software Architect and
or an Software/Business Analyst), in this case, its data model and user
interface model.

In other words, BL, focus is on the Information Architecture of the
Site, My focus is on the Information Architecture of the information
that the site exposes, that is mainly unstructured in physical terms.
This is because for the first there is already decades of work done (in
Software Architecture), and in the second there is not. I can provide
loads of references for the first if one wants to.

No wonder that I don't understand Boniface, and he does not understand
me.

Best regards,

Nuno Lopes