I say tom-r-toe. You say tom-aye-toe

What is it about terminology that makes some people roar and others cringe? While the literature has a lot to say about the problems of knowledge sharing between groups when language is different [1], there are some obvious obstacles to sharing knowledge in the same language when the terms, or even the style of language to describe information, differs between groups.

In the medical field, the National E-Health Transition Authority in Australia (NEHTA) is currently developing a taxonomy of terms, and an ontology to support it, to fully articulate the relationships between the chemical composition of a drug and its medicinal use all the way down to how it is represented as a product on the shelf. This set of terms is supposed to help systems “efficiently exchange data and improve how important clinical and administrative information is communicated between healthcare professionals”.

This initiative would be a great step forward if only this dictionary of terms actually represented the way that doctors prescribe medicines, the way that pharmacists in Australia dispense medicines, and the way in which companies label and market their products. Of course there are also other taxonomies around the world that also try to do the same thing, and some of them are more successful than others. The hard thing is to apply their use outside of community that uses them.

When I was recently doing some IA work in the area of health I think I found about half a dozen or so of these so called “standards”. I also found that a number of business-teams working in the same organisation each with unique terms of their own used to describe these same things. If it were just an issue of Eskimos having a zillion words for ice it probably would have been OK, but rarely did each term carry any additional meaning. You can imagine the pain caused when it came to developing a shared business system, not to mention the problems associated with creating documentation, with each team demanding specification documents with their own terms reflected and refusing to sign-off on them until this was achieved.

How can you manage terms and definitions when there’s no agreement of a one-size-fits-all approach, especially when your goal is to achieve a one-size-fits-all approach?

Topic maps are a good way to manage this chaos. For these teams I created a wiki powered by a topic map engine, allowing the members of each team to collaborate to describe the terms they used. I then coopted bribed persuaded asked subject matter experts to create the relationships between terms and across those teams. Where one team used, for example, the term “tom-r-toe” and another “tom-aye-toe”, the topic map allowed for the existence of both terms, and their definitions as agreed by those teams, and included a relationship between them that indicated they were actually the “same term”. Other relationships, like “equal term”, “equivalent term”, “parent term”, “child term”, even collections of terms, were also captured. A module in the topic maps engine even allowed for the capture of which terms were used in what documents and included an glossary of terms as an output just to make each team happy. There was even some talk of the topic map being used provide team-preferred terms within the business systems interface.

Having “one taxonomy to rule them all” isn’t always necessary when communicating knowledge across teams. Language might be a barrier, but if you can articulate and capture the relationships between terms, then you’ve got a translation matrix that will assist with and ease the burden of knowledge transfer, and can help with challenge of creating awareness of differences and similarities in intra-office communication.

M

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[1]. Preece, J. (2004) Etiquette and trust drive online communities of
practice. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 10(3), 294-302.

Gulping your IA is bad for your health

Joshua Porter picked up on my comments and blog post about social design and gulped at what he saw. When talking on IAs, Joshua writes:

“IA at its most basic is the wrong frame with which to approach Design”

“The problem is that IA models information, not relationships. Many of the artefacts that IAs create — site maps, navigation systems, taxonomies — are information models built on the assumption that a single way to organize things can suit all users … one IA to rule them all, so to speak.”

“One technologist and designer … even referred to this ever-growing set of definitions as the ‘IA land-grab’, referring to the tendency that all things Design are being redefined as IA.”

To be honest, I found Joshua’s comments quite amusing.

And if Joshua had’ve wrote most IA models information, not relationships, I would have agreed with him. I’ve done quite a number of work in the area of information classification and know first hand that most standard approaches to organising information (by some IAs) simply don’t work because not all people think about their information in the same way.

As knowledge workers, most of what we do is use and process information, use other people’s knowledge, and produce more knowledge and information, in the course of our day-to-day working lives. What I keep seeing, time and time again, are systems that try to help people to do this work, but are badly designed.

Most systems architects, designers, and business analysts, therefore, try to solve the problems people have with accessing knowledge and information by coming up with ways to make systems that are easy to use. Many designers (IAs, UX specialists, and the like) deliver taxonomies and other rigid expressions of information classification and just expect users gulp them down believing them to be inherently usable. A recent experience with a developer reinforced this for me — he was going to use the same systems template he had always used and expected people to just learn how to use the system.

For the most part, there are very few cases where “one IA to rule them all” will work (specialist fields of science immediately come to mind). Generally, I get indigestion when I think about delivering only one way to find information.

To deliver systems that support knowledge work, ones that are truly usable, all designers (IAs included) need to first understand:

• why do people do what they do
• how do they think about the knowledge and information in their heads
• what information do they need, and
• how do they share it with others

Most of this is User-centred Design 101, as articulated by Jesse James Garrett.

To answer these questions, I draw on theories and models from my psychology background. I find that understanding how people think, how associative memory and recall works, and the behaviour people exhibit when looking for and processing information, is vital to my design work. This helps me determine how navigation systems need to work for a particular group of people, for particular users, and for a particular exercise. My expertise in social psychology also gives me insight into the group dynamics and interactions, so that social behaviour, particularly the sharing of information, can be modelled and supported.

I know many IAs say that what we do is both “art and science” [1], but I don’t agree. It draws heavily on the science of cognitive, behavioural and social psychology (or at least, if it doesn’t, it should do so more of the time).

Lastly, and probably most importantly, most modern models of how people store information in their heads, and how they relate to information (as Joshua rightly suggests), is about relationships, and not about classifying information itself. This is why I believe that topic maps are so important in the information classification paradigm. Put simply, with topic maps, you can represent and articulate the relationships between pieces of information, rather than having to classify them. And these are pathways that have built in redundancy — just like the web of memories in people’s heads, navigation models should allow multiple ways to find information, rather than using just one.

Does this mean an ever widening definition of IA is or does? Are IAs doing the land-grab? Hardly. IAs need to evolve their discipline to ensure that as new ways of thinking emerge they incorporate them into the systems they designs. For me, being an IA means bringing psychology, knowledge management and almost 15 years of experience working and designing for the web. Ultimately, adapting an evolving discipline will mean better systems for knowledge workers — and isn’t that the point?

M
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[1]. Information Architecture. Wikipedia. Online at: http://en.wikipe….rmation_architecture

Categorise this! — the Information R/evolution

Luis Suarez found this the other day — it’s very cool.

It makes an excellent point about the difference between traditional information management issues — of creation, categorisation, and findability — and the modern way (the Web 2.0 way).

3 tags and “it” is now “stored” in all 3 “places” at once
without folders
without restricted categories

- Mike Wesch, Digital Ethnography

For me, this difference is at the very heart of why I have such trouble with traditional information professionals, from librarians and records managers, to knowledge managers. Many of these information professionals (present company excluded of course!) still believe that information categorisation requires specialist and expert skills, lest it be miss-categorised and lost. I think this myth is behind the current folksonomy debate — that they are chaotic and evil because of their inherent idiosyncratic and un-standardised nature and must, therefore, be managed.

The web allows knowledge and information to be free of the boundaries of possession and of its physical constraints. It’s time for old things to pass, to stop thinking like children, and think like adults. Times have changed. Let’s stop treating our information like its physical, categorised, owned and filed … because it’s just not physical any longer.

M