The number and variety of governmental agencies, businesses, and information providers actively seeking to establish a digital presence on the World Wide Web has underscored the need for "findability" in the design of Web sites. Findability, as defined by Morville (2005), is the ability of users to identify an appropriate Web site and navigate the pages of the site to discover and retrieve relevant information resources. Wurman (1996, p. 16) observes that "The ability to find something goes hand-in-hand with how well it's organized." But locating information resources in the digital environment depends on more than organization. As Morville observes, findability is an inherently interdisciplinary concept that integrates practices of design, engineering, and marketing: Findability encompasses not only issues of organization and representation-two central concerns in the construction of an effective information architecture-but also information seeking behavior, interaction design, branding, search engine optimization, and Web standards, to name but a few of the considerations that can affect findability. The focus of findability is on facilitating and enhancing the user's overall experience with an information resource; information architecture is just one facet of the complex of interactions that contributes to that experience. Information architecture (IA) is, at best, an ambiguous term that came into widespread use with publication of the first edition of Rosenfeld and Morville's (1998) Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. Rosenfeld and Morville describe the primary objective of IA as the provision of effective access to relevant information resources on a Web site. It is precisely this problem of access in digital collections that has propelled information architecture and information architects into the forefront of Web development. For Rosenfeld and Morville, however, the task of the information architect is not simply to provide access to relevant resources on a Web site but also to ensure that a user will have multiple means of access to those resources. To this end, they focus on the systems of navigation, labeling, organization, and searching as the primary elements an information architect uses to specify how users will be able to access information resources.Because of its strong association with Rosenfeld and Morville's book, IA is generally identified with the design of digital environments for the Web. There are those, however, who view IA more broadly. For example, Morrogh (2003, p. 6) describes IA as "the design of information environments and the management of an information environment design process" that finds its origins in a range of fields sharing a common interest in the communication, management, and preservation of information-fields such as computer science, library science, social informatics, and human-computer interaction. He conceives of IA as the summation of a long history of innovations in information and communication technology (ICT)-innovations that are directly ...

In the wake of the global financial crisis, the U.S. Dodd‐ Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd‐Frank) was enacted to provide increased transparency in financial markets. In response to Dodd‐Frank, a series of rules relating to swaps record keeping have been issued, and one such rule calls for the creation of a financial products classification system. The manner in which financial products are classified will have a profound effect on data integration and analysis in the financial industry. This article considers various approaches that can be taken when classifying financial products and recommends the use of facet analysis. The article argues that this type of analysis is flexible enough to accommodate multiple viewpoints and rigorous enough to facilitate inferences that are based on the hierarchical structure. Various use cases are examined that pertain to the organization of financial products. The use cases confirm the practical utility of taxonomies that are designed according to faceted principles.

This paper is a preliminary comparison of the theories used to represent concepts in the field of knowledge organization with similar theories that are used in the field of cognitive categorization. Both disciplines employ the same general types of conceptual representations, such as features, dimensions, labels and relationships. Both disciplines are also concerned with how people use these representations to organize and retrieve information. However, cognitive categorization is generally concerned with internal conceptual representations (ICRs), which are maintained in memory, while knowledge organization is generally concerned with external conceptual representations (ECRs), which are maintained outside of memory. This fundamental distinction has profound effects on how the representations are structured, accessed and maintained. This paper explores these differences and points out cases in which ICRs and ECRs may affect each other. This analysis will support future research that utilizes ICRs in the study and evaluation of ECRs.

This study explores the construction of a faceted vocabulary that can be used as a mechanism for organizing Web-based resources. After analyzing the manual process of faceted vocabulary construction using existing organizational structures to identify heuristics for automating the construction process, we modeled a hybrid, semi-automatic approach to facet generation that integrates the strengths of manual and automatic methods. This approach is based on the organization of terms according to the meanings of their suffixes.Although this heuristic could not usefully organize the majority of terms of the lexicon bases to which it was applied, it nevertheless shows promise as a component of hybrid classification.Enumerative classification schemes have long provided an effective tool for organizing a collection of resources by assigning each resource to a single class in a set of predefined and mutually exclusive classes. Although librarians have traditionally relied on classification schemes such as the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) and the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) to provide access to physical resources, the use of machine-based full-text searching undermined the perceived utility of classification for information discovery and retrieval. However, growing frustration with the huge retrieval sets and numerous false drops that accompanied do-it-yourself searching on the Web has generated renewed interest in classification, categorization and the power of controlled vocabularies --interest reflected across the Web landscape, from Web directories such as Yahoo! to metadata initiatives associated with digital libraries and the Semantic Web.There are many challenges to a classification-based approach to organizing the Web. For example, it is impossible to "organize" the whole Web due to its massive size and the diversity of Web resources. Even if such a feat were feasible, clustering approaches are not incremental and text categorization approaches are based on a static classification scheme, rendering them unable to deal with the dynamic nature of the Web corpus. A highly variable and dynamic environment such as the Web requires an organizational approach that not only provides flexibility of representation and accommodates the dynamic nature of human knowledge itself but is also able to respond to the information needs of a highly diverse and increasingly interdisciplinary population.Because traditional classification schemes attempt to enumerate all knowledge in a given domain within a fixed set of predetermined classes, they are ill-suited for organizing resources in the diverse and multidisciplinary environment of the Web. Recognizing the inherent rigidity of traditional enumerative structures, 1945) proposed a more flexible approach to organization that represented knowledge not as a set of static classes but as a set of concepts and relationships. This approach identifies the various aspects (characteristics or facets) of a given domain so as to derive a set of independent concept hierarchies t...

This paper presents experimental results showing that a user's interaction with hierarchical classification may affect the user's conceptual structures. After performing a directed browsing task using a hierarchical classificatory structure, subjects rated as more important the concepts that were organized in the top tier of the hierarchy. The results of the study suggest that, although subjects adapted their conceptual structures to the hierarchical structure in some conditions, these effects depend not only on the structure, but on the specific concepts that appear in the structure.