basicsdetailsstructuresimpactsummary april 3, 20074 rich information structures school of...

April 3, 2007 1

Basics Details Structures Impact Summary

Rich Information Rich Information StructuresStructures

School of Information, The University of Texas at Austin

i385F Special Topics in Information ArchitecturePresentation by Ray James

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Technology brings change

• Technological advances create information intensity

• Intensity promotes complexity• How to organize, intra-relate massive

amounts of information?– To facilitate efficient retrieval – To inspire creativity

• The floppy dinosaur

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A new direction

•Solution: Rich information structures

•New ways to access, view, & interpret information

•First, the basics

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Rich Information• Richness : information’s potential

or how much new understanding is provided (Lengel, 1983)

• Medium impacts information quality– Rich info loses value in ineffective

media– Poor info neither gains nor loses

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Rich Information Structures

• Tight structure of documents and relationships that enables a contextual interpretation beyond the information contained in the individual entities

• Quality information retrieval requires rich info structure

• Critical for access to information space

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Nature of the beast• Abstractions exist as document entities• Various environments (web, archives, presentation

tools, or electronic document management systems)

• All are environments for storing and relating collections of abstractions or documents.

• Distinct, but each organizes information space• All are information entities with relationships • Organizes information to relate it to the individual• Must support searching and browsing information

structure without perspective of person who conceived it

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How to build•First, decompose document content•Separate

– Syntax: arrangement– Semantics: meaning

•New ‘building material’ offers flexibility, extensibility, & ease of use

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Qualities of basic material

• Flexibility means adapting the structure to various situations

• Extensibility relates to the fact that it is not possible to envision all possible uses

• Ease of use implies that the semantics can be extended or adapted easily without changing the overall structure

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Decomposition

• Add complexity by breaking document into smaller chunks each with keyword(s)

• Build relational constructs independent of original documents

• Creates new information• Automate the process • Use XML as the main tool

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Semantic minus syntactic

• Separated semantic structure can create different document structures

• Does not impose compositional structure

• No fixed frame of reference • Flexible recombinations

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Rich information structures

• New information structure offers new ways for accessing, viewing, and interpreting information.

• Direct access to specific information (more pathways)

• Different points of view (direct access)• Access the information structure from

alternative views (facile redesign)

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The payoff

• The specifics of the semantics and the depth or level of the decomposition are left up to the user, while integrating new abstractions into the overall structure at the discretion of the user.

―Tunçer et al

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Rich rewards

• Add complexity to information to go beyond predefined viewpoints

• Opening information to unfamiliar audiences provides the possibility of unexpected viewpoints & new interpretations of existing information

• New views can lead to creative discoveries

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Value of process

• Decomposing documents by content & integrating into a tight structure achieves complexity, simply

• Method expands the document structure, replaces some entities with detailed substructures & augments structure with content information.

• Rich information structures can easily be constructed from a collection of common abstractions

―Tunçer et al

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Value of process

• New complexity offers new ways of accessing, viewing, and interpreting this information.

• Approach provides flexibility, extensibility, & ease of use in the construction of rich information structures

―Tunçer et al

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What it all means

• Technology will bring more information• New approaches to handling

information are required• Understanding and building rich

information structures may be the best approach

• Methods that work will survive

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ReferencesRich Information StructuresTUNÇER Bige; STOUFFS Rudi; SARIYILDIZ SevilFaculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlandshttp://www.bk.tudelft.nl/informatica/toi/ Towards Rich Information Landscapes forVisualising Structured Web SpacesKeith Andrews, Michael Pichler, Peter WolfInstitute for Information Processing and Computer Supported New Media Graz University of Technology.Information Richness: A New Approach to Managerial Behavior and Organization Design, by Daft ad Lengel (1984) Organizational Structures to Match the New Information-Rich Environments:Lessons from the Study of ChaosFrancis X. Neumann, Jr.Public Productivity & Management Review, Vol. 21, No. 1. (Sep., 1997), pp. 86-100.http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1044-8039%28199709%2921%3A1%3C86%3AOSTMTN%3E2.0.CO%3B2-K

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