Sorting through a pile of old papers today I found a little stash of articles about the ways content can be sorted. It was neat to run across so many different ways of sorting information. Here's part one of what I found in the pile.
Information seekers pursue objects relevant to their tasks and apply task action steps to achieve their intentions. ... In planning a web site to present complex information structures, it helps to have a clear definition of the atomic objects and then the aggregates. Atoms can be a birthdate, name, job title, biography, resume or technical report. With image data, an atomic object might be a color swatch, icon, corporate logo, portrait photo or music video.
Information atoms can be combined in many ways to form aggregates such as a page in a newspaper, a city guidebook or an annotated musical score. Clear definitions are helpful to coordinate among designers and inform users about the intended levels of abstraction within each project. Information aggregates are further combined into collections and libraries that form the universe of concern relevant to a given set of tasks.
Strategies for aggregating information are numerous. Here is a starting list of possibilities:
- Short unstructured lists. City guide highlights, organizational divisions, current projects (and this list).
- Linear structures. Calendar of events, alphabetic list, human body slice images from head to toe, orbital swath.
- Arrays or tables. Departure city-arrival city-departure date.
- Hierarchies, trees. Continent-country-city (Africa-Nigeria-Lagos), concepts (sciences-physics-semiconductors-gallium arsenide).
- Multi-trees, faceted retrieval. Photos indexed by date, photographer, location, topic, film type.
- Networks. Journal citations, genealogies, World Wide Web.
These aggregates can be used to describe structured information objects, such as an encyclopedia, which is usually seen as a linear alphabetical list of articles, with a linear index of terms pointing to pages. Articles may have a hierarchical structure of sections and subsections, and cross references among articles create a network.
Some information objects, such as a book table of contents, have a drual role since they may be read to understand the topic itself or browsed to gain access to a chapter. In the latter role they represent the actions for navigation in a book.
Excerpted from "Designing information-abundant web sites: issues and recommendations" by Ben Shneiderman in International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (1997) 47, 5-29
