Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

Boxes and Arrows: Ranganathan for IAs: an excellent history lesson about the father of faceted classification.

More questions from information architects.

Microsoft Tackles Enterprise Content Management: MS’s CMS Server (used to be NCompass) seems to have grown up and is now a serious contender, especially because of it’s focus on ease of integration and productivity.

Trying to explain XFML concepts, I have made a dodgy cartoon, a generic overview that won’t really help anyone and a comparison with other technologies. The implementation checklist may actually be useful. (All at the XFML wiki)

I had never seen Microsoft Clippy (at microsoft.com!): “My name is Clippy, and Office XP has me sweating (and rusting). Why? Because Office XP works so easily that it’s made Office Assistants like me useless. Obsolete. And, I’m told, hideously unattractive.”

The company I used to work for went into liquidation. But you wouldn’t say so from looking at their homepage.

Game Studies 0102: Cultural framing of computer/video games. By Kurt Squire: “In the United States, and increasingly in Europe, games such as Doom or Quake have garnered a disproportionate share of attention in the press, as they have become pawns in a culture war waged by cultural conservatives. As many gamers, critics, media scholars, and social researchers agree, this discussion has been devoid of any serious study of games.”

Measuring Information Architecture Panel at CHI 2001:

“They almost never credibly analyze their implementations.
[...]
However, with the rise of interaction design and information architecture, and the overt intention of delighting end users even while making their lives easier, the design community has continued their push into the experience domain. Over decades, without a credible basis for defining or measuring the whole of human experience, they have garnered an astounding quantity of successes.
One could conclude that success in this domain requires only the ability to innovate or to follow strategically, and the ability to deliver user-perceptible value. Which is another view of science: that quantification merely follows, but that science (especially the social sciences) proceeds through innovation and serendipity in theory and application, and by the delivery of ultimate value. Decided:
Abandon quantification; and may the fittest win.”

Evaluating systems after they have been built is important, but is almost never done. It is a business problem: it isn’t being done because it’s hard to sell. The main value of developing a business model where you can sell that research-after-the-fact lies in the increased experience it creates for the implementors: they can then find mistakes faster and thus learn from them faster.

Digital Web Magazine: “The primary problem of user-centered design is that people engage in it at the expense of all else. Oftentimes, what is *most* useful, usable, and meaningful to the end-user is untenable from a business perspective, and the product, while maybe popular, is a financial failure. Additionally, UCD can often get bogged down in process, in needing to verify every design choice with users, unnecessarily encumbering progress.”

An attempt to describe what XFML looks like.

First, you have to create some metadata that will be exported as XFML. You can use your usual content management interface for that - most cms systems have some type of metadata creation ability. This is what it looks like in Moveabletype:

Note that there is more metadata available in MT, generated by the system itself: amount of comments for example, or date of publication.

Another possible interface for creating metadata comes from an authoring application still under development:

Next you have to assign metadata to webpages. With MT, that looks like this:

With our under-development-being metadata authoring application, it currently looks like this:

So now you have a bunch of topics and pages that you assigned topics to. You are ready to export an XFML file. You should add a template (how to do that in MT) or use the capabilities of the cms to export XFML (here’s the XFML module for Drupal). On your website, you can put a button that looks like this:

It links to your exported XFML feed. Look at it in your browser, it looks like this:

Now things get funky. You now have an XFML feed available, that you can import into other applications. For example, if you import the above XFML file in Facetmap, you get this lovely browsing experience of this weblog:

An alternative view: an earlier version of that file imported in bpallen technologies’ Teapot server product:

It even gets funkier once reusing other people’s indexing becomes possible with new applications. But more on that later - meanwhile some more reading: here’s an overview of software that currently supports XFML.
Also check out the XFML wiki.

p i x e l v i e w - behind the screen with Carrie Bickner: “I think about markup the way a more traditional librarian would think about the manufacturer of a printed book. I look for well-produced structural markup the way my print-world counter part would look for acid-free paper and a good binding. Library materials, whatever format, need to be preserved. If they are built well, they will last.”

The 1 Percent Solution?: “Four major online publishers: a renowned pure-play content site, two major newspapers with very successful free sites, and one of the world’s major financial dailies. Each has great marketing and promotional power. Each spent 4 to 18 months trying to convert users into paying subscribers for traditional content. Each converted no more than 1 percent.” (Via Webword)

I’m very satisfied with cloudmark so I keep plugging it: it has blocked about 95% of all spam. Very easy to use as well, and the beta can be downloaded free (some problems have been reported but I never experienced any of these)

Nice overview of StatisticalLaws (IAWiki)

Matt Mower’s Knowledge Log: “Whilst XTM and XFML do have many similarities (and theoretically you could represent any XFML document using XTM — I think [note: Yes indeed]) they are different.
XTM was designed to be a generalized format for representing arbitrary topic relationships. The upshot is that XTM, whilst expressive, is relatively complicated. XFML is more focused and so, IMO, easier to get going with. XTM can support arbitrary, complex, relationships among topics. XFML supports fewer simpler relationships. Don’t go getting the idea that XFML is inferior though.
One of XFML’s guiding principles is that it be focused and easy to implement. In this I think it succeeds admirably. The spec is only about 8 or 9 pages long. [...]“

dive into mark: “RSS 0.9x and 2.0 are the Whoopee Cushion and Joy Buzzer of syndication formats. For anyone who has tried to accomplish anything serious with metadata, it’s pretty obvious that of the various implementations of a worldwide syndication format, we have the worst one possible. - Except, of course, for all the others.”

RDF Interest Group IRC Scratchpad: “dajobe: XFML looks like aiming for an ‘RSS 1.0′ sweet-spot of simplifying things for a particular purpose.”
Indeed.

XFML: early adopters.

Live live live! It starts with an X and ends with an L :)

Tanya knows me :) Is there a way to automatically import people who know me into my FOAF file?

I wrote template to publish an XFML feed. It still could do with some additional MT wizardry, but it works.

Step 1. Create a new index file in your MT admin screen. Set your output file to xfml.xml Copy the text of this text file into the template.

Step 2. Rebuild and check if the generated file displays as valid XML.

Step 3. Add an XFML button and a link tag to your main template.

Step 4. Save your XFML file on your computer, go to Facetmap and import it. Behold.

Another teaser image of the metadata authoring tool I’m playing with. Interface-wise, I’m going for ugly but efficient. I’ll worry about looks later. When playing around and building a metadata map, I realised I needed a way to easily manipulate topics in all facets really quickly - the following interface allows for that, without resorting to fancy DHTML that I wouldn’t be able to program anyway. The stars indicate parentage - just add a star to make a child topic. You can type “delete” after a topic and it gets deleted. Type “facet [22]” after a topic and it gets moved to another facet. Ugly but fast.

This is exactly the sort of thing an upcoming metadata authoring tool I’ve been working on will make a lot easier: indexing other people’s content. Once you have good tools for indexing, and a format for sharing the data, a lot of things become possible. I’ve been writing a taxonomy and indexing some information architecture sites with the beta of the tool, and I can’t wait until it’s finished, because that will mean other people will index too. And I’ll be able to tap in to these other indexing efforts. Boy!

I used the FOAF-a-matic to generate this FOAF file of myself.

I added “Month of publishing” as a new facet to the XFML feed of this weblog (I will publish the template when XFML goes live). “Author” would make another nice facet.

I just realised this older article of mine describes the problems that faceted classification quite nicely solves. It’s not particularly clear (like my thinking at the time; I knew I’d found a problem but couldn’t describe it very well), but what a title! Lost in the Matrix

Seb: Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research. “I’ve tried to make it serious-looking enough for academics, yet straightforward and engaging enough for non-academics. It’s been a delicate balancing act and I have mixed feelings over the results.”

I’m trying to find different methapors and ways of explaining faceted classification. “It lets you triangulate when searching” seems to work well. The “It’s like a diamond, you can look at things through different facets” seems less convincing.

Seb’s Open Research: “faceted classification consists in choosing several attributes (”facets”) and classifying things under particular combinations of values for these attributes. The appeal of this scheme is its combinatorial power that lets it automagically make room for things that don’t exist yet.”

Tanya points out Seb’s Open Research categorizes people funnily.

IAwiki: ContentSilos: a nice overview. Surely, there must be something postive about silo-ing your content? Anyone?

Iaslash has a whole heap of new features, including an XFML feed. Funky!

Bookslut Issue Six

Yum! SIMS 202 Information Organization and Retrieval: the Berkeley course on Information Organisation is probably one of the best in the world. Answers questions like “What is information?”, “How much is there in the world” and more. Talks about faceted classification, metadata in search, implementation issues and such. I’m gonna be spending some time on these :)

Faceted classification is quietly taking off. Here’s a quick overview of some implementations.

The original browsing tool for faceted classification was Flamenco, a research project at Berkeley university, which happens to also be the home of much of the more interesting research on how humans categorize the world (think Lakoff). But anyway.

Further research is being done in universities, often focussing on trying to implement a system using faceted classification for access to information. Facet project at University of Glamorgan for example. Or FATMKS at UCL.

Commercial implementations exist as well: bpallen (responsive engineers) and Endeca (hidden behind an almost inpenetrable wall of marketeese) both provide systems for browsing information with FC. They don’t seem much better than the Flamenco system, interface-wise, though.

In a category of its own we have Facetmap: it’s interface is excellent and evolves fast. Facetmap is the work of one man.

Faceted classification (FC) is also being taught. This homework paper (PDF) is an excellent tutorial for FC in itself - check it out. Really. If you’re still confused, here’s an excellent Berkeley slideshow onclassification systems. More papers are yours if you keep digging: Experiences with a Faceted Classification Scheme in a Large Reusable Software Library (in short: faceted classification alone isn’t enough). But we were talking about implementations.

I believe implementations will quickly reach an acceptable level of maturity. The interesting bit comes when real life experiences start coming back, and when easy availability of tools allows more experimenting. I think faceted classification theory will have to become more rich, and that richness will come from the experiences with interfaces. And not just browsing interfaces, creating faceted metadata (or any kind of metadata really) is a huge challenge, and tools can really help there as well. And then distributed metadata. Anyway, my point is: tool availability is coming, and that’s good because that will allow us to experiment and then refine the theory. I’m gonna shut up now.

I’m re-reading “Women, Fire and Dangerous Things”, and came across this discussion on Re: Basic Level Categories. Linguistics is one of the most interesting fields around - I’m also trying to follow a linguistics course my girlfriend is taking, and it already changed many of my preconceptions. (Such as that of a dialect not being as valuable as the official language somehow.)
As for basic level categories, I’m sure the insights gained from the research around categories can be useful for information architects.
Yum. Slideshow on categorisation at Berkerly. Berkeley teacher papers. Finding the Flow in Web Search. (pdf)

Quick preview of some XFML software we are working on: this screen pops up after clicking a bookmarklet and lets you assign topics to the page you were on.

gladwell on the metaphors of interviewing: “Not surprisingly, interview specialists have found it extraordinarily difficult to persuade most employers to adopt the structured interview. It just doesn’t feel right. For most of us, hiring someone is essentially a romantic process, in which the job interview functions as a desexualized version of a date. We are looking for someone with whom we have a certain chemistry, even if the coupling that results ends in tears and the pursuer and the pursued turn out to have nothing in common. We want the unlimited promise of a love affair. The structured interview, by contrast, seems to offer only the dry logic and practicality of an arranged marriage. “

the Less-Than-Perfect User, including a picture of the Perfect User many people tend to design for. Nice!

XFML: xml format for shared, faceted taxonomy of metadata: XFML Core is finally available for public preview. Click the purple button at the top of this page for an example XFML feed. It still needs some work: I want to find a way to not display entries with no metadata assigned in MT. Any tips?

You have to like a spec that has a bunch of flowers as its “symbol”.