Week 8 Pre-tutorial questions

Based on Moreville & Rosenfeld, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, answer the following:

1. What is the difference between organisation schemes and structures?

Organisation schemes are ways of assigning information to certain types of categories. They group information which share common characteristics of contents and organization them into categories logically. On the other hand, organization structures define the relation between the categories and contents. The structure of information influence how the users negative the contents.

2. List the various types of organisation schemes.

Exact Organisation schemes:

·      Alphabetical
based on alphabetical order

·      Chronological
based on the date of release

·      Geographical
based on the location of information

Ambiguous Organisation schemes:

·      Topic

Organisated by topic or subject (eg. Travel, Food, Health, Art)

·      Task
Organisated into a collection of processes, functions or tasks
(eg. Edit, buy, help)

·      Audience
divided into different types of audience who are relevant to that information
(eg. Teenagers, adults, family, male, female)

·      Metaphor
Relating information to the familiar. Easy to understand.

(eg. Computer desktop, icons of folders, bin)

·      Hybirds

Mixed-up of various schemes

3. List the various types of organisation structures.

·      Top-down approach

It is hierarchical organisaton. Subdivided with parent-child approach.
(eg. Family tree)

·      Bottom-up approach
sorting information by stored data in fields and records. They are linked together into different relations. (eg. Database structure)

·      Hypertext

A Nonlinear way to organize data. It involves chunks of information that linked to each other and the links between those chunks. Hypertext can connect contents such as text, image, video and audio hierarchically.

4.What is social classification?

It is individual’s collaborative organization. Users can tag the objects such as image, video or post with different keywords. This is content creation as users tag objects using their own perspective. Those tagging will be grouping together according to those tags. Users then can search the contents using those tags. For example, Flickr and Instagram use self-describing taxonomies system to classify images into groups.