The story you are about to read is true. Only the URLs have been
changed to protect the innocent.
A brief discussion of Wurman
Wurman claims that there are only five possible organizations of data:
category, time, location, alphabet, and continuum. He sounded far too
sure of himself, so we tried poking holes in his theory. As we tried to
find other possible organizations though, we kept realizing that Wurman
could look at our organization as either categorization or continuum.
The trouble is, these two organizations are a sort of catch-all;
anything that is discrete can be seen as categorization, and otherwise
it's a continuum. In fact, alphabetical order, time, and location are
all just extremely useful continuums. (Actually, Christian decided
alphabetical order is not a continuum, but is in fact a dust with
fractal dimension log(25)/log(26). After much debate we decided he was
right, but we threw Oreos at him anyway.)
While it might be possible to force most organizational systems into
one of Wurman's categories, this doesn't seem very useful. We came up
with quite a list of ways to organize information on the web, each
suited to certain types of data and uses of that data. These include
orderings by:
Categorization
- Author
- Subject
- Media (sound, graphics, animation, text, etc.); e.g. the sunsite ftp server
- Source of material (e.g. sound-clips by movie they're from)
- Distributor (who put it on the net)
- Service type (WAIS, FTP, Gopher, etc.); e.g. CERN resources list
- Flavor; e.g. Snapple
Continuum
- Time
- Geographic location
- Number (size, magnitude, etc.)
- Alphabetical
However, we did come up with one more from of organization that did not
fit into any of Wurman's categories: randomness. An example of this
type of organization would be the French swimsuit-picture page "Femmes femmes femmes je vous
aime!" which serves up a new random picture each time the page is
accessed. While this system is certainly not useful if you're looking
for something in particular, it keeps a high interest in the service
over time due to curiosity of what picture will be chosen.
Jumping around the net
Categorization
The categorization of data by hierarchical subject area is useful for
directed browsing: browsing when you aren't sure exactly what you're
looking for (or what's out there) but have general areas of interest.
By being led through hierarchical pages (each focusing on more specific
subject areas) the user is led to progressively focus his search, such
that by the time a leaf node is reached the user has decided on a
specific item of interest. This method is not nearly as useful if the
user knows what he or she wants exactly, because it often takes several
steps to reach a leaf node. A good example of this type of subject
categorization is The
WWWVirtual Library subject catalogue.
The ontology of
hierarchical subjects does limit the kind of actions the user can
perform and the kind of data we can classify. For example, a
hierarchy implies that our information can be intuitively clumped into
large groups, and that these groups in turn can be further
classified. Also, the fact that our structure is hierarchical implies
that each subject fits only into one superclass. For example, though
it is certainly possible for a page on biochemistry experiements to be
pointed to by both the chemistry and biology subjects, this breaks the
model we started forming of a tree fanning out with information at the
leaves.
Guided Tour
Organizing data in a guided tour model is useful when there is a strong
linear thread running through the data (such as in a story, or when data
relies on previous data to be understood). In these cases a guided tour
can supply the user with that main thread, without restricting the user
from occasionally going off on tangents that interest him. A guided
tour fits nicely with (but doesn't require) a geographic conceptual
model, since we tend to think of guided tours in cities or through
exhibits of some sort. A good example of this merging is in the Soviet
Archives Exhibit, which is based on a very complete "virtual museum"
metaphor.
Location
While location has always been a useful organizational tool for atlases,
guidebooks, and the like, it is an especially nice tool when mixed with
the ability to click on a map or picture to gain more information. This
sort of organization is really only useful when location is the most
salient or the most important feature of the data. When location is the
most salient feature in data (for example, in gaining information about
states in the Union), it might actually be easier to search for a data
point by location than by alphabetical listing. When the location is
the most important feature, the organization of the data actually gives
extra information that would be lost otherwise. For example, in
deciding what college to go to, a student might be very concerned how
far away from home each university is. By placing universities on a
map, the user is not aided in finding a specific university so much as
he is guided to specific universities based on that
organization. A good example of a geographic location metaphor is the
European Home Page.