An Information Model provides the framework for organizing your content so that it can be delivered and reused in a variety of innovative ways. Once you have created an Information Model for your content repository, you will be able to label information in ways that will enhance search and retrieval, making it possible for authors and users to find the information resources they need quickly and easily.
The Information Model is the ultimate content-management tool.
Creating your Information Model requires analysis, careful planning, and a lot of feedback from your user community. The analysis takes you into the world of those who need and use information resources every day. The planning means talking to a wide range of stakeholders, including both individuals and groups who have information needs and who would profit from collaboration in the development of information resources. Getting feedback requires that you test your Information Model with members of your user community to ensure that you haven't missed some important perspectives.
You need to learn
- what an Information Model is
- why an Information Model is critical to the success of your content-management system
- how to create an effective and usable Information Model
It's very easy to tell when a Web site you're trying to navigate has no underlying Information Model.
Here are the tell-tale characteristics:
- You can't tell how to get from the home page to the information you're looking for.
- You click on a promising link and are unpleasantly surprised at what turns up.
- You keep drilling down into the information layer after layer until you realize you're getting farther away from your goal rather than closer.
- Every time you try to start over from the home page, you end up in the same wrong place.
- You scroll through a long alphabetic list of all the articles ever written on a particular subject with only the title to guide you.
Sound familiar?
What does it feel like when a well-designed Information Model is in place? Oddly enough, you generally don't notice a well-conceived Information Model because it simply doesn't get in the way of your search.
- On the home page, you notice promising links right away.
- Two or three clicks get you to exactly what you wanted.
- The information seems designed just for you because someone has anticipated your needs.
- You can read a little or ask for more -- the cross-references are in the right places.
- Right away you feel that you're on familiar ground -- similar types of information start looking the same.
Did all of these pleasant experiences happen by accident? Not in the least. Finding the information you needed quickly and easily requires a great deal of advance planning. The basic planning and design tool is the Information Model.
What is an Information Model?
An Information Model is an organizational framework that you use to categorize your information resources. The framework assists authors and users in finding what they need, even if their needs are significantly different and personal. The framework provides the basis on which you base your publishing architecture, including print and electronic information delivery.
An Information Model might encompass the information resources of one part of an organization. For example, your Information Model might provide a framework for categorizing your corporate training materials or the technical and sales information that accompanies your products. Your Information Model might include engineering information produced during product development, policies and procedures used internally in the day-to-day conduct of business, information about customers used in your sales cycle or about vendors used in your supply chain. Some of the information resources you bring under content management might be available across the corporation for internal use, such as human-resources information. Other information resources might be specific to the needs of one department or division of your organization.If an Information Model is clearly defined and firmly established, users will be on a fast track finding and retrieving the information they need.
As you plan what to include under content management and what to exclude, you must consider a wide range of dimensions through which you will categorize and label your information. Some of the dimensions will be specific to the needs of information authors. Others will meet the requirements of your products and services. Still others will explicitly meet the needs of internal and external users of information.
As you design your Information Model, consider how large an information body it must encompass. Some Information Models are very small, specific, and limited in scope. Others stretch across entire organizations, encompassing thousands or millions of pages. In the next section, you start with a small, personal Information Model. In subsequent sections, you consider larger, more complex models for larger bodies of information.
The three-tiered structure of an Information Model
The Information Model you build will have a three-tiered structure. At base, the first tier of the Information Model consists of the dimensions that identify how your information will be categorized and labeled for both internal and external use in your organization. The second tier sorts your information assets into information types. The third tier provides structure for each information type, outlining the content units that authors use to build information types. Figure 4-1 illustrates the three-tiered structure. In this chapter, you learn how to determine the basic dimensions of your Information Model. In Chapter 5, Developing Information Types and Content Units, you learn how to identify your information types. And, in Chapter 6, Using Content Units to Structure Information Types, you learn how to identify the content units that provide the internal structure for each information type.
The three-tiered structure of an Information Model
The dimensions you identify as the foundation of your Information Model become the attributes and values of the metadata you will use to label your modules of content in your repository. The information types will provide your authors with the basis for creating well-structured modules that represent a particular purpose in communicating information. The content units will describe the chunks of content that are used to construct each information type.
In the next section, you will look at an extended example of the process one might use to begin the development of an Information Model. Throughout the core design Chapters 4, 5, and 6, I refer to this extended example to provide you with a model for developing the Information Model for your organization.
Starting with a personal view of an Information Model
Here is a typical example of how an Information Model might be applied. At home, I have a large collection of cookbooks and cooking magazines, plus lots of recipes cut out of newspapers or sent by friends and relatives. Yet, every time I want to find a particular recipe I remember having used or look for a new recipe for a dish I want to try, I'm stymied by the very books that are such a valuable resource. Where is that recipe? Which book or magazine was it in? Was it last year or ten years ago? Is it in the small green file box or the large cookie tin?When a sound Information Model is in place, it assists users in finding the answers to their questions.
The cookbooks I own are organized in various interesting ways. Some are organized by month, based on the original magazine issues. Sunset Magazineô, for example, publishes a cookbook annual in which each chapter contains a month's worth of recipes from its magazine. Other cookbooks are organized alphabetically by ingredient or by country of origin. Still other cookbooks are organized by the main ingredient or a part of a complete meal. Several books I own have sections focusing on chicken, pork, beef, or vegetables. They also have sections on soups, desserts, and appetizers. All these different organizations are interesting and effective individually. However, as a complete collection, they fail. They fail because they lack a comprehensive Information Model to support the organization of their content.
How might I improve the organization of the recipes in the cookbooks? First, I would need to understand how I or another amateur cook might search for and use the information. If I'm organizing the content for myself, I might want recipes organized by ingredients, parts of the meal, country of origin, and time to complete. I might also want to organize them by recipes already tried, successful recipes, unsuccessful recipes, new recipes that look interesting but remain untried. All of these categorizes would facilitate searching for just the right recipe for an occasion. In fact, by assigning one or more categories to each recipe, I would be building an Information Model to fit my conceptual view of the cookbook world. If I wanted to include others in my Information Model, I'd need to know something about the categories that would be interesting to them.
The Information Model also assists authors in retrieving information for reuse and revision. It helps us answer questions like
- Where is that explanation of what cornstarch does in a recipe?
- Where are the recipes for pasta with asparagus?
- Don't you have an instruction for cutting a chicken into pieces for frying?
By following a link from Cooking 101, the amateur chef locates an explanation in the Ingredients Encyclopedia on a well-organized Web site. A comprehensive Information Model underpins the Web site design.
An organizational Information Model
Several years ago, I conducted an interesting and significant test of an organization's informal Information Model. A state department of vocational rehabilitation needed to answer questions from its constituencies, which included disabled individuals seeking job assistance and companies inquiring about hiring and supporting the disabled. Much of the information to answer these questions could be found somewhere in the large volumes of government regulations and policy statements maintained in the organization's library, in the offices of staff members, and in the heads of key employees. Unfortunately, the right person with the right information to respond to a question wasn't always available. Or, the person taking the question would not always know whom to ask. As a result, some customer questions were not being handled as well as management wanted. They needed a content-management system to support their goal of being responsive to their constituencies. I conducted an Information Audit of their responses to provide a design concept and cost justification for the new system.
The audit was simple and interesting to conduct. Based on a well-researched list of typical questions developed by the experienced managers, members of my staff called at random with requests for information. They recorded how long it took to obtain the right answer. Most of the time, the department staff was very effective. Calls were answered promptly; often the person taking the call could provide the correct answer immediately or within a few minutes. But, at times, callers were shifted around to several individuals without obtaining a satisfactory answer to the questions. In other cases, the promised materials never arrived in the mail. Sometimes the materials received weren't the right ones. Although the staff was very competent as a whole, better internal access to information resources was sorely needed.
People use many sources to find the information they need: other people, the library, books nearby on office shelves, sources in other organizations. A sound Information Model ensures that the sources of information are effectively categorized according to the users' conceptual model of the information.An Information Model could be built so that it facilitated ease of access and accuracy of response. In this instance, much of the information needed to answer questions was available, although not always quickly available. In cases where the correct information was not available at all, the gap meant that new information assets should be developed.
The investigation showed that a content-management system was needed. To be effective, the content-management system needed to be based on a sound Information Model, one that would become the eventual framework for a content-management system. The immediate goal was to make the information resources readily available to the staff members. The long-term goal was to make the information resources available to the outside customers through an Internet site. If it was well designed, the Web site would allow the agency's constituents to find their own answers even more quickly and easily than by calling in.
A place for everything
One way to think about an Information Model is as a large filing system -- a place for everything and everything in its place. In fact, you have the real life example of the library as a content-management system that embodies a particular Information Model. Through familiarity, people learn to make effective use of a common and consistent Information Model to find what they need.
At university, I learned how to use the graduate library which was organized according to the Library of Congress' Information Model. I knew exactly where to find the books I needed, often without using the electronic catalog system that had recently replaced the old paper card catalog system. I knew which floor the eighteenth century history books were on and where to find the art history as well. In fact, I could walk into any university library and pretty much find my way around. The Information Model on which these libraries are based is quite uniform among higher-education institutions. It gives you a nice, comfortable feeling of continuity. The books are where you expect them to be. Each book has a number that identifies its place on the shelves, and experienced users who have learned how the system works feel very much at home.
Unfortunately, not all libraries are the same. Going to a different kind of library is as disconcerting as venturing into a new Web site.
In recent years, I have used the local community library far more often than I use the university library. My local library was at first really confusing; nothing was where I expected it to be. The reason -- they manage their content using a different Information Model, a different arrangement of categories, based on the Dewey Decimal system, which is often used to organize community libraries. I was frustrated to discover that the books by my favorite author were in one location while the books about the author were in quite a different location. Eventually I figured out the system but I have never felt quite at home with it.
Information Models not only facilitate fast search and retrieval, they also create a sense of familiarity and belonging for their users. As experienced users of a content-management system based on a sound Information Model, you know where to find what you need. It's right there in the same place it was last time and exactly where you expected. As a library user, the Information Model underlying the library's content-management system allows you to manage the content effectively for yourself.
Even familiar models are challenging for newcomers
Unfortunately, Information Models that are quite understandable by experienced individuals are often equally obscure to newcomers. The vocational rehabilitation department could create an organization for their information resources that would be easily accessible to trained personnel working on the inside. But would the same organization of information work for the outsiders, the people with the questions? Most likely, the answer would be "no."
The problem is that the content-management system that is useful for the authors of the information is not usable by users of the information who do not understand the underlying Information Model.
Take the case of the library. The typical catalog makes information available in several ways, typically by the name of the author, the title of the work, and keywords and descriptions associated with its subject matter. If you know the author's name or the title of the work, the search can be reasonably quick and easy. But lacking that critical information, the opportunities for frustration abound. How do you find information when you have no title and no author? How do you, for example, find out about the insect that bit you in the jungle of Guatemala and is causing you excruciating pain? Is it listed in a guide to Central American entomology? What about a book on tropical diseases? Just where do you begin? If you were an expert on insects or tropical diseases, you would know where to look. But without an expert's knowledge of the underlying Information Model, the solution would probably be too long in coming. If you were on a Web site, you would be tempted to click out before you wasted any more time becoming frustrated.
To be usable by a wide range of individuals with different experiences and expectations, an Information Model must be designed by those who take the time to study and understand the prospective users. By organizing information resources through our analysis of the users and envisioning the user experience you expect for the future, you have a chance at being successful in helping your users reach their goals quickly.
Information Models based on static categories can be difficult to learn
The problem with the libraries is that to gain familiarity with their Information Models, you need help and experience. In fact, you even need to have some training in school about how to find things in the library. The libraries employ quite sophisticated help systems, often in the person of reference librarians, to help naive users find what they need. The reference librarians are taught methods of asking the right questions of the users in order to point them in the right direction. Unfortunately, when your customers visit your Web sites, there are no helpful librarians -- so all the assistance has to be immediately obvious to them. The Information Model you design provides the framework for that assistance.
An Information Model is based upon the categories you select to label and organize your information resources. These categories must emerge organically from your analysis of user requirements. Otherwise, your users will experience some of the same problems that occur in the library -- a set of formal categories that is based more on the categorizer's view of the nature of the information resources than upon the users' needs.
The information architects of the public and university libraries made decisions based on a formal categorization of the material in the collections. The primary organization follows academic, classical subjects -- history, art, music, literature, science, and so on. The secondary and tertiary organizations are based on author's name or time period (centuries) or geographic locations and a host of other possibilities, depending on the nature of the subject. The organization appears to mirror the organization of the academies, especially in the university libraries. The people in the History Department are sure to find much of the information they need in the history category. For novices to become experts, they have to learn the system. The system doesn't change in response to the users' needs.
The more the Information Model reflects the way that users think and work, the more effective it will be in delivering the right information to them.
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