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Definition

Author Stefano Bussolon

Information has to be structured to be used by people. In an user centered design People uses Internet mainly to search and share informations. Information has to be structured in a coherent way to be easy to find by the users (or different ways of retrival should be provided), and the structure should respect their implicit expectations. Information architecture is a corpus of knowledge, methods and technics focused to optimize the way information is represented, labelled and structured. Information Architecture (IA) is commonly understood to be the art and science of structuring, organizing, and labeling information so that content owners can better manage it and users can find what they're looking for more effectively. IA can be bottom-up (i.e. analyzing and labeling content chunks) or top-down (i.e developing standardized categorization schemes or taxonomies). Among the goals of Information Architecture we can list:

• identify which contents users espect to find in a web site;
• evaluate the importance users attribuite to the different contents;
• discover the lexicon used by the users, and adapt the labels to that lexicon;
• structuring the information units (like web pages) in hierarchical partitions (trees);
• identify the items that could be problematic in the categorization.

http://www.iawiki.net/DefiningTheDamnThing http://www.eleganthack.com/blog/archives/00000069.html