archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Information Architecture is getting a bit of a buzz these days – as someone just noted on one of the discussion lists – so I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise that a few friends in related fields have asked how to get started as an IA.

The real question is – do you *want* to?

Beyond this, you’ll be getting into deeper water that could become downright chilly. Ever read a thesaurus just for fun? Is your first answer to every question “It depends on -” ? Do you instinctively read through and itemize in order of priority all the categories on the menu in a restaurant before you look at the descriptions of any of the dishes?

Before you nod your head to the above and slap a sticker on your bumper, I’d recommend buying / borrowing / stealing “Information Architecture for the WWW“, and reading the intro and the first chapter. There are other good titles dealing with some of IA’s many facets out now, but a quick read through the front of Rosenfeld and Morville will give you a feel for the perspective and outlook that IA uses without too much of a time investment. If you don’t like the feeling at that point, then I’d say that something else is more your forte. Unless of course you have pressing needs, or disturbing masochistic tendencies that lead you to pursue specialized disciplines that you don’t really enjoy.

If it does feel right, then skim the rest of the book and try reading through the case studies at the end. If you’re still interested, then it might be a good way to go. If at any point your eyes glaze over (did someone say “schematize” again?) or you’re genuinely bored, then I’d suggest that either setting this particular quest for personal and professional enlightenment aside, or shifting your goal to learning some of the basic language and possibly acquiring some specific IA skills.

After that, the sky’s the limit. I’m active (well, ‘active’ might be a bit bold, but what’s life without aspirations?) within the AIFIA mentoring initiative, so I’m part of a group of IA’s looking at exactly how to go about matching candidates for mentoring with the right teachers.

If you’re curious about education options, there are courses, certificates, and even some new masters programs coming on line.
Resources for all these questions and more can be had for free at the ia wiki.

Hope this helps…

Here’s a some snippets from an article in the Web Services Journal that nicely explains some of the business benefits of a services-based architecture that uses ontologies to integrate disparate applications and knowledge spaces.

Note that XML / RDF / OWL – all from the W3C – together only make up part of the story on new tools for how making it easy for systems (and users, and businesses…) to understand and work with complicated information spaces and relationships. There’s also Topic Maps, which do a very good job of visually mapping relationships that people and systems can understand.

Article:Semantic Mapping, Ontologies, and XML Standards

The key to managing complexity in application integration projects

Snippets:
Another important notion of ontologies is entity correspondence. Ontologies that are leveraged in more of a B2B environment must leverage data that is scattered across very different information systems, and information that resides in many separate domains. Ontologies in this scenario provide a great deal of value because we can join information together, such as product information mapped to on-time delivery history mapped to customer complaints and compliments. This establishes entity correspondence.
So, how do you implement ontologies in your application integration problem domain? In essence, some technology – either an integration broker or applications server, for instance – needs to act as an ontology server and/or mapping server.

An ontology server houses the ontologies that are created to service the application integration problem domain. There are three types of ontologies stored: shared, resource, and application. Shared ontologies are made up of definitions of general terms that are common across and between enterprises. Resource ontologies are made up of definitions of terms used by a specific resource. Application ontologies are native to particular applications, such as an inventory application. Mapping servers store the mappings between ontologies (stored in the ontology server). The mapping server also stores conversion functions, which account for the differences between schemas native to remote source and target systems. Mappings are specified using a declarative syntax that provides reuse.

RDF uses XML to define a foundation for processing metadata and to provide a standard metadata infrastructure for both the Web and the enterprise. The difference between the two is that XML is used to transport data using a common format, while RDF is layered on top of XML defining a broad category of data. When the XML data is declared to be of the RDF format, applications are then able to understand the data without understanding who sent it.

Thanks to Beatrice Pulliam and Caryn Anderson for the the chance to talk about Information Architecture at a Simmons College panel on careers for LIS graduate students. The event – Information Professionals In and Out of the Box: An ASIS&T Alternative Career Panel – brought four GSLIS graduates and myself back to talk about potential careers related to LIS. I was the only non-graduate and the only IA on the panel. Titles for the other speakers included Manager, Data Services and Quality Product Manager, Metadata Specialist, and Database Manager – all roles that I’ve worked closely with or in some way performed under the heading of Information Architecture.

It was a genuine pleasure to talk to a group of interested students, and also my first window into the early academic codification that’s happening in and around the realm of IA.

After the session, I was introduced to some of the Simmons faculty; Candy Schwartz (also here), who taught the first dedicated course on IA offered at Simmons, and Gerry Benoit the current instructor. Dr. Benoit works in many areas, including Systems Theory – which is one of the subjects I’d like to explore more, since it seems very relevant to some of the core concepts of IA.

Following up, I learned that Caryn is
“…working with a Harvard research fellow and Fulbright scholar on the emerging specialization of Integration & Implementation Sciences which is coordinating research and development in the areas of complexity science, systems thinking, participatory methods, diverse epistemologies, interdisciplinarity and knowledge management for application to complex, large scale problems. One of the key challenges of integrating research from various disciplines is facilitating the various personalities, priorities and languages of the folks involved.”

Aside from sounding very interesting, this is a good summation of my current consulting role, minus the obligation to create too many Powerpoint presentations. I’ll try to find out a bit more, and put out an update on what I learn.

Here’s a recap of the session, complete with some zesty live-action photos.

In busi­ness terms, I’d call the last sev­eral months of tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties with Unacom.net a bad ven­dor selec­tion and man­age­ment expe­ri­ence. From a more per­sonal per­spec­tive, it was frus­trat­ing, and a dis­ap­point­ment, since I’d wanted to add fresh con­tent to the site on a reg­u­lar basis after some trav­el­ling and start­ing a new full-time posi­tion before the win­ter hol­i­days.

Una­com charges lit­tle and deliv­ers less; for $80 per year, cus­tomers can count on receiv­ing badly con­fig­ured host­ing envi­ron­ments, poor sup­port and respon­sive­ness, and sub­stan­dard reli­a­bil­ity. I won’t cat­a­log their sins, but I will offer one exam­ple of the qual­ity of their offer­ing: sev­eral days ago their entire net­work went down — name­servers and all — for almost 24 hours, and a friend of mine who uses them to host his on-line order­ing and ful­fill­ment site had to do some ama­ture detec­tive work and call the owner’s *mother* in order to find out what was hap­pen­ing.

I sin­cerely hope my new host­ing ser­vice — APlus.net works out much bet­ter.

There are lots of lessons in this, but what struck me the most was the intan­gi­ble costs. I started look­ing at Una­com on the rec­om­men­da­tion of a friend who used them as a pre­ferred host for clients for some time, and is now severely embar­rassed when­ever the issue comes up.

I cer­tainly don’t hold him respons­ible for Unacom’s incom­pe­tence, but I know that he feels bad about the time and oppor­tu­nity wasted by the friends and clients who choose Una­com at least par­tially on the basis of his rec­om­men­da­tion. As a con­sul­tant, your liveli­hood depends on the cred­i­bilty of your rec­om­men­da­tions. And as a busi­ness, it depends on meet­ing the com­mitt­ments you make to cus­tomers — which Una­com doesn’t seem capa­ble of doing.

After a few long evenings (and lots of chmod…), JoeLamantia.com is now pow­ered by Move­able­Type 2.6. This marks a much-needed upgrade, since the older ver­sion ran on MT 1.4: it’s akin to mov­ing from sail to steam.

I’d orig­i­nally intended to move from 1.4 to 2.6 as a first step, and then imme­di­ately put a gen­uine CMS behind it — most likely Dru­pal — once the new blog core was sta­ble. But after all the trou­ble with Una­com, I’ve decided to just post for a while.

As an exper­i­ment, I’m going to use MT to man­age all the pages on the site, mean­ing that sta­tic pages and nav­i­ga­tion will grad­u­ally dis­ap­pear as I fold those sec­tions into the blog-managed systme of entries and cat­e­gories.

In the mean­time, I’ve per­suaded friends who are much bet­ter at devel­op­ment to exper­i­ment with Dru­pal, and report back to me on the install and tem­plat­ing sys­tems.

I looked at using a wiki for this pur­pose, but again I’ve decided to wait and see how this approach works out for some oth­ers. With ref­er­ence to the over-worn tech­nol­ogy adop­tion cycle graph (which is sec­ond only to Maslow’s Hier­ar­chy of Needs as the most abused exam­ple of a trite the­o­ret­i­cal simpi­fi­ca­tion of the inor­di­nate chaos of the real world used by those with­out expe­ri­ence as jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for spec­u­la­tive buseinss deci­sions), I sup­pose this strategem marks me as a “Insid­i­ous Vision­ary” more than an “Early Adopter”: I select a likely tool or solu­tion based on needs and trend analy­sis, and then con­vince oth­ers to actu­ally try it and see what hap­pens…

Unfor­tu­nately, the new lay­out looks like crap (again a tech­ni­cal term) in Opera and Mozilla for rea­sons unknown. There are no tables and posi­tion­ing as almost totally dri­ven by stylesheets. A deep and abid­ing resent­ment of the has­sles of deal­ing with browser incom­pa­biltity lead me to aban­don development-based roles in the mid­dle 90’s, so I’m going to just admit defeat on this point right now, and have done with it. Pend­ing the move to a new set of tem­plates in a new sys­tem, I’ll revisit the issue.

Talking over the prospects for current and former Internet and dot com professionals over lunch one day during the summer of 2002, I learned from an MBA student that in business schools the joke about B2B was that it now meant “back to banking” and B2C stood for “back to consulting” – cynical, but no doubt true.

Accordingly, I’m excited to be going B2C at a boutique consulting firm based in Cambridge, called netNumina. After a few years in product companies large and small, I’m looking forward to a consulting environment again. This is a refrain I hear from other friends from who’ve moved into industries and roles outside consulting. Once a consultant, always a consultant?

Regardless, large biopharmaceutical and financial services companies are the lion’s share of netNumina’s clients, so I’m doubly excited about and looking forward to the chance to work within large and very complicated information spaces.
Employment prospects are a bit better now in most Internet related fields – despite offshoring – and it seems that demand for Information Architecture is solid, based on my experience with this most recent round of freelance contracts and job searching.

This is a sign of improving health and understanding in the market for IT and knowledge workers.

Why so, when other roles and titles continue to fall by the wayside? Because Information Architecture is one of the few disciplines that expressly aims at moderating the unpleasant effects of the ocean of unstructured data and the endless number of haphazard information environments now enveloping daily life. The biopharma industry in particular is experiencing organizational pain as a result of accumulating so much data, in so many disparate reservoirs, with little or no ontological structure.

But before I start, I’m taking a few weeks to travel – Amsterdam, Barcelona, Iceland.

JoeLamantia.com is mov­ing to a new host­ing provider over the next few days, and might be down from time to time while I migrate, upgrade, and rearchi­tect. Please bear with us dur­ing any tech­ni­cal difficulties…

It’s my plea­sure to announce the recent appear­ance of Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture in two very dif­fer­ent and most unex­pected places.
The first is in lead­ing pol­icy jour­nal For­eign Affairs, where the term is men­tioned in a let­ter to the Edi­tor by David Hoff­man, Pres­i­dent of Internews in the July / August 2003 issue. Why is it impor­tant that IA appear in a pol­icy jour­nal? For­eign Affairs is legit­i­mately one of the most influ­en­tial pub­li­ca­tions in the world, in that it con­sti­tutes a (nom­i­nally — decide for your­self as always) non-partisan and pub­lic forum for cur­rent and for­mer world lead­ers, lead­ing polit­i­cal the­o­rists, and active mem­bers of major gov­ern­ment and non-government orga­ni­za­tions to dis­cuss, debate, and decide national and inter­na­tional pol­icy. Fro exam­ple, while many peo­ple both in Amer­ica and abroad were taken by sur­prise when Pres­i­dent Bush announced his administration’s doc­trine of pre-emptive strikes against poten­tially threat­en­ing coun­tries, read­ers of For­eign Affairs would have seen Con­doleeza Rice out­line her vision of the new Amer­i­can world order in some detail dur­ing the cam­paign — before Bush was elected, and she assumed the role of National Secu­rity Advi­sor. Hoffman’s use of the term infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture (pg. 210) is broadly inclu­sive — he says, “Iraq now faces many chal­lenges, among them to rebuild a cred­i­ble infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture and to train a new gen­er­a­tion of jour­nal­ists who can report fairly, objec­tively, and inde­pen­dently on that soci­ety.” — and the nature of his orga­ni­za­tion as in Internet-based free media project means it is less remark­able that he would employ the term than some­one out­side the Inter­net com­mu­nity like Made­line Albright, but it is nonethe­less sig­nif­i­cant that IA is now seen as crit­i­cal in a polit­i­cal con­text. Too often we focus on the busi­ness, aca­d­e­mic, or even aes­thetic con­texts of IA. Yet if Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture is to be as gen­uinely rel­e­vant a field as I sus­pect a major­ity of we who are its prac­ti­tion­ers believe it capa­ble of being in the very near future, then we must adov­cate for it’s vis­i­bil­ity and effi­cacy on the polit­i­cal level.

The sec­ond note­wor­thy appear­ance is in my home town of Can­ton, Ohio, in the form of a list­ing on Monster.com seek­ing can­di­dates for a full time job open­ing inside a local adver­tis­ing agency. Can­ton is a medium-sized (pop­u­la­tion 90k) pre­dom­i­nantly blue-collar for­mer heavy man­u­fac­tur­ing cen­ter known for two things; the Pro­fes­sional Foot­ball Hall of Fame, and a remark­ably low cost of liv­ing (for exam­ple, a full 62% lower than New­ton, MA, where I’m rent­ing at the moment, accord­ing to the salary cal­cu­la­tor avail­able on Monster.com). The for­mer means that for the one week each year pre­ced­ing the induc­tion of new mem­bers into the Hall of Fame, Can­ton becomes the cap­i­tal of the pro­fes­sional foot­ball uni­verse. The lat­ter means that the sub­urbs north of Can­ton have become a rapidly grown­ing bed­room com­mu­nity for upper mid­dle class com­muters work­ing in the Akron and even Cleve­land metro areas. By indus­try base, demo­graph­ics, geog­ra­phy, and cul­ture, Can­ton is quite lit­er­ally the last place that I ever expected see a post­ing for an Infor­ma­tion Architect’s posi­tion. And yet there it is: the agency in ques­tion (Innis Mag­giore) hap­pens to be one of the fastest grow­ing adver­tis­ing firms in Ohio, and a large pro­por­tion of those involved in the cre­ation and man­age­ment of infor­ma­tion spaces now rec­og­nize the indis­pens­able nature of IA.

I called Innis Mag­giore to ask them about the open­ing, but haven’t been able to speak with them yet to find out how they iden­ti­fied the need, how many appli­cants they’ve had, and what level of qual­ity the appli­cants demon­strate. I’ll post any­thing I learn further.

It is dif­fi­cult to antic­i­pate what one is sup­posed to take away from just the first half of an eclec­tic and heav­ily styl­ized movie released far away from its con­clu­sion. Nev­er­the­less it’s safe to set this qual­i­fier aside when review­ing it, since some com­bi­na­tion of direc­tor, pro­ducer, stu­dio, actors, and dis­trib­u­tors obvi­ously believed the first half of Kill Bill Vol­ume I was solid enough to stand on it’s own as an offer­ing, and released it with all the cus­tom­ary fan­fare.  I was dis­ap­pointed (even after estab­lish­ing low expec­ta­tions in the first place). The action and fight­ing set pieces were fine (Yuen Wo Ping did a much bet­ter job cre­at­ing inter­est­ing chore­og­ra­phy for Kill Bill Vol. I than for The Matrix: Reloaded), but the story used as Kill Bill’s skele­ton is so flimsy it is almost in the way — espe­cially when pre­sented in the dis­jointed plot / nar­ra­tive we’re accus­tomed to from Taran­tino — and aside from a few scat­tered moments of inspired cin­e­matog­ra­phy ( the water bucket and foun­tain in the zen gar­den), I found the film flat.

As an homage to samu­rai movies, it was largely faith­ful: Taran­tino man­aged to con­vinc­ingly recre­ate the feel of a Sat­ur­day after­noon B-movie on cable tele­vi­sion. But from a Hol­ly­wood direc­tor in 2003, that’s a loos­ing gam­bit. What made the orig­i­nal Samu­rai movies Taran­tino apes in Kill Bill a sat­is­fy­ing experience was their essen­tial for­eignness, and the very dif­fer­ent view­ing con­texts and asso­ci­ated expec­ta­tions that enveloped them. Lack­ing both of these key sup­port­ing ele­ments, I’m left won­der­ing about the point of the exer­cise for the moment.

C404 — an art/media group — brings you music icons includ­ing The Sex Pis­tols, Hen­drix, AC/DC, and Van Halen per­form­ing live in videos ren­dered in Wachowski-style cas­cades of glow­ing ASCII text.

I cre­ate cat­e­gories pro­fes­sion­ally, which means it’s almost inevitable that I’m inter­ested in things that chal­lenge and escape cat­e­gories (the “mind forg’d man­a­cles” Blake labelled so well) by their nature.

Though I’m sure this will appear in an over-miked com­mer­cial for tooth­paste or pick-up trucks soon, at the moment it’s a new way of look­ing at sev­eral very famil­iar cul­tural prop­er­ties that ques­tions the thresh­olds of recog­ni­tion, per­cpetion, and iden­ti­fi­ca­tion we rely on every day.