Information architecture
From Memography
Memography is an exercise in information architecture by an information scientist.
It owes much to the Information Architecture Institute, especially two of its founders, Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld, whose inspirational book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, rekindled the author's love of library science.
The Polar Bear Book, as it is known in the IA community (thanks to the O'Reilly animal gracing the cover), teaches us that information must be organized and labelled to facilitate navigation/browsing and searching.
Labelling (keywords) can be inside the documents in the form of topical headlines and hyperlinks, or "outside the docs" in metadata. Descriptive metadata, which might be derived from a taxonomy or thesaurus, can be used by a metadata-enhanced search engine to access the documents. We hope the metadata describes the document to the searching machine. Metadata is said to capture the aboutness of a document.
Who enters this metadata? Using what tools? If information architects build the taxonomies and ontologies that are capable of describing all the documents, will editing tools be easy enough for the average author to associate metadata with every document? Without descriptive metadata indicating aboutness, the search engine goes back to full-text search.
Auto-categorization and classification systems can make guesses at the aboutness of a document, especially when trained on specific document vocabularies. But they are notoriously poor at understanding documents.
A meme ID is like a magic bullet in the document saying "I am about this meme."
Can we construct a general taxonomy of memes, and then specialized lists of meme IDs that authors will feel comfortable adding to their documents?
