Glossary Term: Information Architect Definition: LouisRosenfeld? and PeterMorville? define information architecture as follows: The combination of organization, labeling, navigation schemes and retrieval mechanisms within an information space. The structural design of an information space to facilitate task completion and intuitive access to Content. The art and science of structuring and classifying web sites, intranets and all other organizational information repositories to help people find and manage information. An emerging discipline and Community Of Practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital and paper-based landscape. The Information Architect is responsible for strategies to Chunk and Tag, for Content Template structures, forms for Content Element entry, Metadata collection, Reuse, Syndication and Aggregation feeds, and database models or schemas. How all the information is represented in the content of the CMS is an architecture problem. This art of classifying information is sometimes called taxonomy, the division of things into classes and class-members. Class-members may themselves constitute a Class with their own Class-members. An Information Architect often has a background in Library Science, where the task was to organize, index, and abstract the books in a library or documents in a bibliographic InformationRetrieval? system. The method included Classification and cataloging of a work under an agreed upon Categorization scheme, such as SubjectHeading?, creation of an Abstract or Description, plus tagging with the usual Metadata - Author, Title, Date of Publication, etc., now all standardized in the Dublin Core. Library Science goals or objectives were to allow users to find/locate books which had been collocated on a shelf or shelves of related books, so they could choose/select the best book for their needs, and then obtain access to the book by checking it out. The difficult problem of displaying and navigating the arbitrary relations between physical books by placing them next to one another on shelves evaporated when information became digital and accessible over the Internet. Despite dealing now with information bits rather than physical atoms ( NicholasNegroponte? ) we still have the five basic objectives defined by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) find/locate collocate/classify choice/select obtain/access navigate. Now arbitrary relations between documents, even at the level of the Content Element, are possible, but the near infinite flexibility poses the great challenge to the Information Architect, what User Interface will be useful, usable, and used? Related Terms: Collocation?, Controlled Vocabulary, Library Science, Thesaurus, Enterprise Information Architecture IA Glossary Index | Back