information architecture

„Information Architecture is the practice of deciding how to arrange parts of somemthting to be understandable” – IA Institute.

The creator of the term „Information Architecture” is Saul Wurman (TED Founder, architect, graphic design) in 1976.

Components of IA: organizational systems, labeling systems, navigation systems, search systems.

The areas of information architects’ activity: contents, context, user.

Factors supporting the functionality of information architecture systems: metadata, controlled vocabularies.

Metadata describes other data & provides information about a certain item’s content. For example, a file may include metadata describing how large it is, when it was created, and other data; web pages include metadata in the form of meta tags being commonly used to describe the web page’s content. Search engines use this data when adding pages to their search index (TechTerms, 2020).

Controlled vocabularies: „A controlled vocabulary is a restricted list of words or terms used for labeling, indexing or categorizing. It is controlled because only terms from the list may be used for the subject area covered by the controlled vocabulary. Most controlled vocabularies also have some form of cross-references pointing from one or more „non-preferred” terms to the designated „preferred” term (European Data Portal, 2020).