The Second Italian IA Summit
We did it again.
Last year in Rome, this year in Trento.
Last year a one-day gig, this year a two-days opus. What didn't change was the enthusiasm: 230 people attended the free conference, and it looks like they loved what they saw and heard. After some long planning and kung-fu fighting, the Second Italian IA Summit is now behind our back, and it's been a success. Let me tell you why.
From Digital to Physical Spaces
Information architecture is not just for the Web: information architecture has a larger impact on many offline activities and affects our daily experience in many different ways.
Its contribution becomes crucial where complexity, unfamiliarity and information overload stand in the way of the user.
We would like to outline a unified model of information architecture able to traverse the diverse contexts we encounter daily, from digital to physical spaces, providing a conceptual framework for the design of cognitive and informational continuity between environments.
FaceTagging
FaceTag is a working prototype of a semantic collaborative tagging tool conceived for bookmarking Information Architecture resources using a rich faceted classification scheme based on the CRG guidelines to improve the browsability and findability of the flat keywords space of user-generated tags.
Implementing facets in Drupal
Take a peek at the forums at Drupal's website and you are granted a first hand experience on the actual meaning of infoglut: the pages host the official documentation and the most popular forums and so much information is available on so many interweaving topics you have a really hard time finding out what's relevant for you.
On classification and data 2.0
The periodic table of the elements is my vote for "Best. Classification. Evar." It turns out that by organizing elements by the number of protons in the nucleus, you get all of this fantastic value, both descriptive and predictive value. And because what you're doing is organizing things, the periodic table is as close to making assertions about essence as it is physically possible to get. This is a really powerful scheme, almost perfect. Almost.
All the way over in the right-hand column, the pink column, are noble gases. Now noble gas is an odd category, because helium is no more a gas than mercury is a liquid. Helium is not fundamentally a gas, it's just a gas at most temperatures, but the people studying it at the time didn't know that, because they weren't able to make it cold enough to see that helium, like everything else, has different states of matter. Lacking the right measurements, they assumed that gaseousness was an essential aspect -- literally, part of the essence -- of those elements.
Clay Shirky, Ontology is ovverrated
