Collections part 2: Collections of things
Posted on March 19, 2010
Filed Under information architecture | Comments Off
The initial impetus for writing this series of posts was the increasing presence of information architectures driven by metadata and the impact this has on editorial curation.
How does moving from a document focused view of the world to a thing focused view change the role of the collection?
We took Wildlife Finder as our example. Wildlife Finder is built upon a domain modelled approach and dynamically aggregates content and data around the ‘things’ in the model. Collections can then be used to build editorial layers on top. As Tom Scott points out:
Collections allow us to curate a set of resources – to group and sequence clips and other resources to tell stories like the plight of the tiger or the years work of the BBC’s natural history unit.
Tom goes on to say that by releasing the data for Wildlife Finder it means that “our audiences and ‘users’ could also build stories”.
Perhaps the most striking example of how the user creation of collections can be used to tell stories is by the use of data filtering tools such as Parallax and Microsoft Pivot.
In Pivot’s own words:
In short, datasets are organized as collections. Results can be as granular or as big-picture as the user desires, and correlations and patterns are easy to see and examine through powerful but simple visualizations. Imagine browsing through thumbnails representing Kiva loans, then sorting the loans by the different types of businesses they helped established.
In order for Pivot to work datasets need to be in a certain format. I suspect that Linked Data will lend itself to these types of tools and products like Wildlife Finder that have focused on curating context as opposed to curating content will benefit greatly.
Collections part 3: You as a collection