"Y'all should register for the fantabulous 'Synonyms and Taxonomies' one-day seminar. It's surprising how little those of us who call ourselves information architects actually know about very basic methods for structuring information."
Peter Merholz, peterme.com

"I learned the terminology to describe thesauri and controlled vocabulary. I can now articulate how controlled vocabularies can complement our company's user-centered design approach."
Seminar Participant
 

"I feel like I can implement what I learned here, especially because of the methodology and deliverables portion of the presentation."
Seminar Participant
 

"I now understand the impact of my high-level navigational design on metadata needs."
Seminar Participant
 

Program Description
If you attend one information architecture course next year, this should be it!

Controlled vocabularies will be the foundation of next-generation web sites and intranets. All professional information architects need to understand how to align controlled vocabulary work with business goals and how to leverage navigation, searching, collaborative filtering, and automated indexing approaches and technologies to achieve cost-effective, scalable solutions.

Join ACIA at our pre-conference seminar to the ASIS&T Summit 2001 Practicing Information Architecture, an inclusive event that will bring together people from business and academia with a variety of perspectives including information architecture, human-computer interaction, visual design, experience design, and usability engineering.

This one-day seminar on Thesaurus Design is the first in a series of advanced interactive workshops led by the experts at Argus (see also: other dates and locations).

Through a combination of presentation, discussion, and hands-on exercises, we'll explain why a thesaurus is an essential component of any large web site or intranet and then we'll explain how to build one for your site.

Who should attend?
This advanced seminar is designed for professionals with one to two years of experience designing information architectures for large web sites or intranets. Our target audience includes:

• Practicing information architects.
• Usability engineers, interaction designers, content authors, or others who've found themselves doing information architecture design.

1. Introduction to Information Architecture Concepts & Methods

An overview of information architecture that will provide a foundation for understanding the advanced material. We'll define information architecture, explain why it's important, and describe a methodology that moves from strategy to design to implementation.

2. Thesaurus Design

We'll present a methodology for designing a thesaurus that's informed by the broader information ecology, composed of business context, content, and users. Highlights will include:

• Opinion leader and stakeholder interviews.
• Content inventory and analysis.
• Site mapping, heuristic evaluation, and benchmarking.
• User research methodologies.

3. Integrating Your Thesaurus

A thesaurus is useless unless it's integrated with respect to your organizational framework, your technical infrastructure, and the user interface. We'll cover:

• Balancing centralization and decentralization with respect to controlled vocabularies and content tagging.
• Building a team to manage your thesaurus over time.
• Selecting the right tools and technologies to develop and maintain your thesaurus.
• Integrating your thesaurus with other technologies and with the user interface to provide powerful, flexible searching, browsing, and personalization systems.

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