Prepared by:

Paul Kahn – Experience Design Director

February, 2013

Media Lab, Aalto University

Helsinki, Finland

Structured DataNone / Some / All

 

1995-2012 = Gazillions of Websites

Our design problem was an evolution of visual literacy

— Readers were trained to find information in printed

books/magazines/newspapers

— Digital publications lack physical context

— Location and scope of information was invisible

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Clients = Publishers Users = Readers

Our Design Task was to connect Readers to Content

— Adapt graphic language – type, color, image – from

the page to the screen

— Create navigation systems that help users

understand what they can find on a website

— Communicate the structure of content in flexible

repeatable units

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2012=Massive Pattern of Nodes

2012=Nodes with Geo Context

Today Users are

— Convinced they can find what they want “on the Internet”

— Producing & managing dematerialized content: photos, videos, music, email, compound documents

— Creators & consumers with storage/creation and retrieval/consumption needs

— Looking for something all the time

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Today Users want to

— Record, share, publish

— Be convinced, amused, in control

— Find, sort, sift and copy

—Mix, reorder and arrange

They don’t explicitly know what metadata is (in most

cases)

They are solving problems by implicitly manipulating

metadata

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Today’s IA/UX Problem

No Structure Leaping into a Vacuum

Raw

Some Structure Stepping into a Marsh Eatable

Complete Structure Traversing a Field Cooked

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Every IA/UX problem is a Metadata Continuum

Structured Data Value Proposition

— People want to find things, they don’t want to “learn”

how to find things

— People understand how to use Structured Data

—No one wants to create Structured Data

— It is our task to leverage the Structured Data people

already understand

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Unstructured Data

Data Vacuum:

no metadata has been added to items

Even Data Vacuums include content & context

The 50-year-old Information Retrieval /

Library Science trade-off:

• Precision: finding only what you are looking for

• Recall: not missing anything that might contain

what you are looking for

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Data with no structure: Names

— A character-string a person, place or thing is known by

— People have many names: professional names, familiar names, legal names

— Places and things have many names in different languages

— As data, a name presents a major problem: it is not unique

— For example: “paul kahn”

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There are many “paul kahn”s

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Paul W. Kahn, author and Law Professor at Yale University,New Haven CT

Dr. Paul Kahn, Urologist in Plantation FL

Paul Kahn, General Partner at Himalaya Capital Ventures, Silicon Valley, CA

Roshi Paul Genki Kahn Spiritual Director of Zen Garland in Wyckoff, NJ

Paul Kahn Information Architect, Docent at Media Lab, Helsinki

What are most people searching for?

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Who is searching?

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Use algorithms to surface what users might

want to see (and what we want them to see)

Cut to the chase

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Where did I put that document?

The tools we use:

— Personal Memory

— Folder names

— Desktop search

What kinds of structure can we present?

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Implicit metadata:

— Document type

— File name

— Document content

Semi-Structured Data

Data Marsh: some metadata without predefined

language or requirements

— Tagging : users add uncontrolled keywords

— Profile: users intentionally add metadata about

themselves

— Time / Location stamps: where and when

— Tracking: users unintentionally add metadata about

themselves as interactions are tracked

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Aggregation/Reproduction Sites

— Sites that aggregate user-provided content

Slideshare / YouTube / Dailymotion / Vimeo /

SoundCloud / Flickr

— Sites where users create and republish

content to social networks

LinkedIn / Facebook / Twitter

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Implicit metadata:

— Sort criteria

— Document type

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Implicit metadata:

— Related

—More

Explicit Metadata

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Structured Data

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Data Fields: where metadata has been explicitly

added to items according to an agreed-upon

standard

— The Content is made to fit a pre-defined structure

— The required parts of the structure are completed

— Each metadata dimension qualifies and reinforces

the meaning of the content

—Many kinds of relationships can be harvested

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Item with Facets

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Map of the Market

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US Holocaust Memorial Museum Propaganda

exhibit

NY Times Immigration Explorer

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Structured data ≠ Usable data

— Does the user understand the required data?

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Tell-all Telephone of Malte Spitz

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Open Paths data from my iPhone

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Tracking purchases

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Would the world be a better place if:

— Everything had a unique ID?

— Every digital object with a unique ID contained structured data?

How does structured data affects quality of life questions?

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Contact Information

Paul Kahn

Experience Design Director

pkahn@madpow.com

Mad*Pow

Portsmouth | Boston | Louisville

www.madpow.com