How does the emergence of the semantic web change the way we think about information architecture?
Transcript
How does the emergence of the semantic web and its associated technologies change the way we approach user experience design and more specifically information architecture?
In Tim Berners Lee’s original proposal for the web he gave us the basic ingredients to build the web of documents as we experience it today. This gave us a easy means to publish documents, refer to them with url’s and point from one document to another with a hyperlink.
In many ways the web became a victim of its own success. The simplicity with which we could publish documents meant we were soon overwhelmed. At this point Information Architects were employed to group together documents into managable piles.
The process would often take the form of a content audit. Grouping an organisations documents into similar types then giving these groups a label and arranging these groups into small hierarchies. If you were lucky you might also do some user testing. For example a card sort to see if a user of your site would expect to find a document in the place you have grouped it.
The problem with this approach is that if we start out focusing on documents our sites turn out document centric. For example navigation that includes things like pictures, news and features or opinion and archive.
If we step back and think about it. The user coming to our site does not have a mental image of a document but rather the player or team they are interested in. People are interested in things not documents.
This leads us to move away from a document orientated approach to web development to a thing focused one and with this move comes the need for new tools and approaches to information architecture.
One approach at the BBC has been to use Domain Driven Design. DDD encourages you before you have written a line of code or draw a wireframe to collectively understand the things and relationships between them in the problem space you are trying to solve. This model becomes the ubiquitous language used by all members of the project. At this point we can also test our model against the mental model of the user. Ensuring the users mental models are built in the very core of the site.
If we look at an example – when the BBC wanted to open up their archive of wildlife clips instead of beginning to publish pages for the clips they first published a page for the things of interest and links between these things. So publishing a page for every species, link them to habitats and behaviours.
Each of these pages then links back the species that it relates to. So you soon start to build up a dense network of links between these things. The emphasis in this approach is to shift focus from the content to model. The assets are associated with the things in the model but the model provides the context.
Anyone who has been involved in building even a modest taxonomy for a site will understand the maintenance overhead that this introduces. In using the rich relationships that an ontology like approach introduces it would be not be feasible to for the BBC to build and manage this product.
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