Boxes and Arrows has published a two-part recap of the recent IA Summit in Portland: Part 1 and Part 2. The recap features fairly detailed summaries (2 or 3 paragraphs each) of all the sessions. Its a nice way to get a quick view of the state of Information Architecture today.
Some nuggets:
Richard Wiggins talked about creating an "Accidental Thesaurus" (as reported by Chiara Fox in Part 1):
To create an accidental thesaurus, first review your search logs to find the most popular search phrases. Plot your queries and you will get a Zipf distribution, showing that a small number of unique searches accounts for a large number of all searches performed. Enter the most popular searches into a database and match each phrase to "the best" URL. A database with only 1000 entries can assist users with 50% of their searches. At MSU they manage this database via a web interface. When the user searches, first the keyword database is queried, then the search engine. The results are presented together on the same page, with the hand picked results at the top. This improves both end-user and content provider satisfaction. Any non-trivial site can benefit from this technique.
Aaron Louie (a UW iSchool MLIS student) had a poster on faceted classification (PDF). Its a well done poster, and he's doing some interesting work with faceted classification and Zope.
James Spahr's poster visualizes two years of Apache logs into a pretty cool diagram (PDF).
Posted by Karl
April 1, 2003 08:20 AM