Perspectives

If you’re building a list of holidays for your local business – to celebrate events, or plan which days to be closed, or temporarily change your website banner accordingly, or promote a seasonal sale – a list of local culturally recognized holidays is probably fine. No one will care if mom and pop’s central Iowa […]

Every organization is in the information business; most work centers around organizing , governing, and distributing information. Sometimes the information itself is the end product: content, whether streaming videos or articles on a website, needs to be organized so that people can find what they’re looking for. The same applies to products: digital environments have

On Taxonomy Governance I believe most taxonomists would agree that building taxonomies is fun. Most taxonomists also do not spend most of their time building taxonomies.  Rather, after a taxonomy program is up and running most of a taxonomist’s effort is spent on taxonomy governance. Many words have been spilled on taxonomy governance; a Google

In part 1, I wrote about Information Architecture (IA) fundamentally moving information from one place to another. While that article touched on some of the practical implications, this part focuses on how focussing on understanding the alignment of users and the capability of the communication channel can  inform and focus the IA work. Information is

In this two-part series, I will be borrowing from the presentation I gave at the Information Architecture Conference earlier this year: Moving Information Across Boundaries, Information Theory for Information Architecture. (1 of 2)

What is a Content Graph?

Image Source: Photo 64004277 / Puzzle © Mikael Damkier | Dreamstime.com In part 1 of this series, I discussed how language models require careful attention to deliver accurate information. Since out-of-the-box language models are trained on general knowledge, using them to leverage your company’s information requires intentional information architecture workflows. In this post, I’ll describe

Image Source: Photo 135270998 © Bangkok Click Studio | Dreamstime.com From image recognition to conversational text powered by massive datasets of recorded human knowledge, our social and business ecosystems are on the cusp of a major paradigm shift in knowledge retrieval and information interaction. Large language models (LLMs) are the poster child for applying artificial

*This post is based on a talk given by Bob Kasenchak at the 2023 Information Architecture Conference. It was a detailed 20-minute presentation designed for IA practitioners. Our goal with this post, however, is to distill it down to its foundational thesis and invite a discussion about the important differentiation between Subject and Topic Taxonomies.