Metadata, Taxonomies, Vocabularies - Do What?

Imagine standing in front of a wall of cubbies filled with parchment scrolls, and not being to find the Tractatus you know exists in there. Or no – make that try to find the right health insurance claim form on your corporate intranet. Your predicament is as old as civilization itself. And content classification structures, including tools like metadata and taxonomy, were invented thousands of years ago to deal with it.

Citizen-Centric Portals

I'm working on a citizen-facing, U.S. government portal in the early stages of becoming an exemplar for e-Government services. I did a peer review to identify other sites that also: 1) Steward and present content from across organizations, 2) Require close inter-organizational coordination for user authentication to deliver secure access to applications and data, and 3) Have to pull everyone involved up by the bootstraps to get the job done.

Wayfinding in Second Life - An IA Puzzle

The founders of the Nonprofit Commons sim in Second Life asked me for input on how to improve navigation for visitors to this 3D environment. The sim houses the virtual offices of more than 25 nonprofits, including CARE, Alzheimer Society of Ontario, AngelAID, Transgender Resource Center, Missouri Humanities Council, Techsoup, and the IA Institute.