2004 March | Nate Koechley's Blog

To be faced with a document collection and not to be able to find the information you know exists somewhere within it is a problem as old as the existence of document collections. Information Architecture is the discipline dealing with the modern version of this problem: how to organize web sites so that users actually can find what they are looking for.

Information architects have so far applied known and well-tried tools from library science to solve this problem, and now topic maps are sailing up as another potential tool for information architects. This raises the question of how topic maps compare with the traditional solutions, and that is the question this paper attempts to address.

The paper argues that topic maps go beyond the traditional solutions in the sense that it provides a framework within which they can be represented as they are, but also extended in ways which significantly improve information retrieval.

After giving a very clear and understandable overview of Controlled vocabularies, Taxonomies, Thesauri, Faceted classification, Ontologies and Other subject-based techniques (throughout section 3.x), the paper give a thorough but clear discussion of Topic Maps, and concludes with a well-reasoned Comparison to other techniques and approaches.

While some argue that Information Architecture is a dry subject, it’s very interesting to me to peek into the level and structure of the thinking that goes into it. The rigor can mirror and enable the technical layer.

[from InfoDesign via Digital-Web

Feature Complete - A Definition; or An Exploration of Varied Knowledge Management Systems at Yahoo!

Mar

26

2004

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By category: Hmmm..., Publishing, References, Tools.

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Feature Complete

All features planned for the release have been completely coded, unit tested by the developer, and checked into source control, ready for the build. We often differentiate between Feature Complete Checkin date, and Feature Complete Build date.”

Prior to Feature Complete (or FC) the focus of the project is on the development team, who is busy implementing the feature set based on the PRDs and (if we have them) Functional Specs and perhaps other specs. After Feature Complete, the focus of the project is on the testing, the fixing and verifying of bugs. The focus during this time is on the bug queue in Bugzilla, and the Bug Council meets daily to prioritize, assign, and defer new bugs as they’re reported.

This content has been censored during migration from my behind-the-firewall blog to this public one.

PS: All this makes me think we need a unified understanding of our knowledge management tools.

Date Format

Mar

25

2004

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Personally, I’ve used many different date formats and notations. Sometimes I’d write mm/yy, sometimes it’d be mm/dd/yy or mm/dd/yyyy. Well, for better or worse, I’ve settled on my personal preference:

YYYYMMDD or yyyy.mm.dd or YYYY/MM/DD

I don’t know what’s the best for you, but this one has been good for me. One of the main reasons I settled on it was because it’s sortable. I use it as a prefix for my documents, and i can always sort. In contrast, sometime I version my files like filename_1, filename_2, which is cool until you get to filename_10, in which case sorting no longer does what it should. Equally bad, you can totally lose track on the sequence when one file changes names. Do you start over at _1 when the detail page is now referred to as the item page? With timestamps in the yyyymmdd format, you can always tell the order of things.

In our world of massive iteration, order is crucial. It’s often the only constant we have!

I wasn’t very confident in this approach, but I knew it worked for me. Doing a little searching finally, i found that it’s actually a ISO Spec #8601. So that settles it, I’ve found my date format of choice.

Which format do you use? Why? What cases haven’t I considered?

Turns out people have talked about this, and this page has a nice Eleven good reasons to use it section which I’ve reproduced here:

language independent - a true international standard from the International Organisation for
Standardisation (see Note 1 below)
cannot be confused with any other popular date notations
consistency with the common time notation system, where the larger unit (hour) is
written in front of the smaller ones (minutes and seconds)
easily readable and writeable by software (no month name to number conversion
necessary)
easily comparable and sortable with a trivial string comparison
strings containing a date followed by a time are also easily comparable and sortable
e.g. 1996-01-15 22:45:37 with most significant value to the left
the notation is short and has constant length, which makes both keyboard data
entry and table layout easier
identical to the Chinese date notation, so the largest cultural group (>25%)
on this planet is already familiar with it - so no feeble excuses like “but no-one
uses this format…”
date notations with the order “year, month, day” are in already widely used
in Japan, Korea, Hungary, Sweden, Finland, Denmark to name just a few. Even people in the US
are already used to at least the “month, day” ordering
a 4-digit year representation would have avoided the Year 2000 problem. If only
they had thought of that when computer technology was being developed…
Astronomers have been using this format for centuries