Information Architecture Mini-Thesaurus

Sarah Kleck
IRLS 695e - Spring 2004

Go To Thesaurus
Introduction

The purpose of this thesaurus is to provide a small selection of preferred terms from the subject area of Information Architecture that represents the main concepts of the subject.  Preferred terms from this thesaurus could be used for indexing - to provide a controlled vocabulary.

The scope of the thesaurus includes the basic concepts of Information Architecture, divided into the following categories: The purpose and goals of Information Architecture, the systems, structures and components used and referred to in Information Architecture and terms used to describe the methodologies used in Information Architecture.

The following abbreviations are used in this thesaurus to indicate semantic relations among terms:

BT   =broader term - This indicates a hierarchical relationship where the entry term is a subordinate to the term listed after BT

NT   =narrower term - This indicates a hierarchical relationship where the entry term is a superordinate to the term listed after NT

RT   =related term - This indicates an associative relationship where two terms are not equivalent or hierarchical, but represent similar concepts

USE   =use - This indicates that the term is not preferred and that a preferred term that follows USE should be utilized instead

UF      =used for - This indicates that the term is preferred and should be used instead of any non-preferred terms listed after UF

SN      =scope note - Scope notes are added to define and further clarify the usage of terms specific to this thesaurus and subject area.

Preferred terms, as well as the relationships among them were selected using literary warrant, utilizing the sources listed below in the "References" section.

Hyphenated terms are included only when the standard form of the term, as determined using literary warrant, indicates that it should be hyphenated.  This thesaurus is precoordinated - meaning that there are many multi-word terms used.  Each multi word term was selected according to its common usage, as well as its representation of a single concept, that is different from what is preresented by the individual words if they were used separately.

This thesaurus was constructed using the ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2003 Guidelines for the Construction, Format and Management of Monolingual Thesauri as a guide.  No filing rules were employed in the construction of this thesaurus, as all alphabetical filing was determined by the software used: MultiTes.

There are 52 total terms in the thesaurus, 37 preferred and 15 non-preferred.  The thesaurus represents only one main subject area, so there is only one top term: Information Architecture.  Under this term, there are 9 hierarchies, representing the main subdivisions of the subject area as mentioned above.

This thesaurus was constructed using MultiTes software and was last updated on 5/15/2004 Comments and suggestions can be sent to: Sarah Kleck.

References:

Dillon, Andrew. (2002). It's Everywhere and Nowhere, Baby! Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 29 (1):27.

Farnum, Chris. (2002). Information Architecture: Five Things Information Managers Need To Know. Information Management Journal, 36 (5): 33-40.

Hagedorn, Kat. (2000). The Information Architecture Glossary. Available online: http://www.asis.org/Conferences/Summit2000/morville/IA_Glossary.doc

IAWiki. IAGlossary. Available online: http://www.iawiki.net/IAGlossary

Kalbach, James. (2003). IA, Therefore, I Am.  Bulletin of the American Socieity for Information Science & Technology, 29 (3): 23-26.

Reiss, Eric. (2000). Practical Information Architecture: a hands-on approach to structuring successful websites. New York: Addison Wesley.

Rosenfel, Louis & Morville, Peter. (2002). Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (2nd ed.). Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates.

Wikipedia. Information Architecture. Available online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_architecture


Go To Thesaurus