Information Architecture Institute
Position Statement for W3C Multimodal Conference

The IAI is a global organization that supports individuals and organizations
specializing in the design and construction of shared information
environments. Through education, advocacy, services, and social networking,
the Institute will lead the way in demonstrating the value of information
architecture to the world at large, and provide a framework for members to
improve their skills and enhance their professional standing.

The IA Institute maintains an online repository of information architecture
related materials in a home-grown system called the IA Library. The IA
Library taxonomy was developed collaboratively and includes a controlled
vocabulary of information architecture and related terms, which serves as a
backbone for the semantic structured of our website.

Our latest technology project involves rethinking the concept of website
redesign, to allow reuse and restructuring of content across all delivery
channels, be they different devices, languages, accessibility needs, input
methods or user-directed design requirements. To do this, we are taking a
semantic approach, beginning with a concept mapping of the IA Library. The
intention is for the IAI website to use the IA Library concept map as a
significant part of its backbone, which will eventually encompass the entire
relevant set of concepts with which information architecture is concerned,
and the semantic relations between them. By connecting information resources
across the entire site to this concept map and similar linked data
structures, we can discover a much richer set of means to connect people
with the information they're looking for than a conventional site hierarchy,
regardless of access mode. We firmly believe that the use of complex
semantic networks represents the future of information architecture, so it
follows that the Information Architecture Institute practices it. This
project is led by Dorian Taylor, IA Institute board member and principal of
PrivateAlpha Technologies in Vancouver, Canada.

Many new techniques have been invented for the express purpose of making
this possible. One technique is the scaffolding, which made it possible to
overhaul the visual design of http://iainstitute.org/ in under 24 hours
without touching any of the 13 back-end systems the IAI has accumulated over
the last decade: http://stage.iainstitute.org/. Note that the visual design
is not a final or even proposed look/feel for our new site but an example to
demonstrate the possibilities.

More information on this technique is available at:
http://doriantaylor.com/the-redesign-dissolved

More information on the strategy is here:
http://stage.iainstitute.org/moving-forward-on-the-iai-website .

To handle this transition, we are currently assembling the IAI's
Infrastructure Working Group, a standing committee to organize the IAI's
content resources, the website they reside on, and the member benefits
derived from it. A description of the group can be found here:
http://stage.iainstitute.org/infrastructure-working-group.

The Institute will continue to explore developing the IA Library as a core
resource for all of our initiatives. We are actively seeking contributions
from members of our community and plan to introduce features that allow
users to author, rate, cite and recommend articles and to add tools,
educational opportunities and social networking functionality. This project
is led by Andrea Resmini, IA Institute President and Assistant Professor at
the Jönköping Business School in Sweden and author of Pervasive Information
Architecture (Morgan Kaufmann, 2012). Board member Shari Thurow serves as
Chief Librarian for the Institute. She is also a member of the NIST IDESG
User Experience group.

Our Dev Ops team, Noreen Whysel, Operations, and Bev Corwin, Development,
are responsible for convergence and integration of the Operations and
Development efforts of these projects for the Information Architecture
Institute. Our Translation of Information Architecture project, led by
Barbara Wiel Marin, IA Institute member and freelance translator in Venice,
Italy, is another key component as it encompasses translation to 19
languages as well as accessibility for hearing and sight impaired. Bev
Corwin, Noreen Whysel and Dorian Taylor (and IA Institute Board Member Laura
Creekmore) are members of the W3C Web Redesign Task Force. Bev is also an
advisory member of the NIST IDESG Accessibility Initiatives, as well as the
NIST Cloud Computing and Cloud Security. Noreen is a member of the NIST
IDESG User Experience Group.

Information Architecture Institute:
www.iainstitute.org

World Information Architecture Day:
www.worldiaday.org

Journal of Information Architecture:
www.journalofia.org

Information Architecture Summit:
www.iasummit.org