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=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
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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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
Mad*Pow
Portsmouth | Boston | Louisville
www.madpow.com