What is ontology? An ontology is a formal system for modeling concepts and their relationships. Unlike relational database systems, which are essentially interconnected tables, ontologies put a premium on the relationships between concepts by storing the information in a graph database, or triplestore. (The following examples use data derived from PLOS, which makes all of its Open Access data and content available.) Relational databases are good at representing tabular data for one-to-one relationships: However, real-life data is seldom this tidy;
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The Dream of a More Human Navigation Realized
Using the customer intentions method to humanize our virtual worlds In the 2010 Sci-Fi film Inception a professional thief is offered a chance at erasing his criminal history if he implants one person’s ideas into the subconscious of another person. He aims to do this by crashing the second person’s dreams. He hires a graduate architecture student to design the dreamscapes. To design each space of the dream, she must align with the thief/dream crasher’s need to easily and intuitively
Continue readingInformation Architecture Expert Panel – Part One
The Structure of Complexity With the 2020 events for World IA Day (est. 2012) and the IA Conference (est. as IA Summit in 2000) approaching, the team here at Boxes and Arrows is taking this opportunity to highlight the importance of Information Architecture (IA). We reached out to some pillars of the IA community to ask them for their thoughts on, where information architecture is today, and where it’s going. Their response was so enthusiastic that we will be breaking
Continue readingEnterprise Information Architecture: A Semantic and Organizational Foundation
People disagree on what happens when IAs grow up, but Tom Reamy knows. He offers a foundation for information architecture as it advances, grappling with problems across the enterprise.
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