Oh boy, how big a
CanOfWorms am I opening here?
There is now a wiki for IAs --
IaWikiDotNet -- at
http://www.IAwiki.net/
See
Information Architects by Richard Saul Wurman, ISBN 1888001380
I've never heard of IA used to directly describe databases, and am more than a little surprised by the "glorified DBA" option above. Obviously other people have had different experiences.
There are some online resources about Information Architecture that might help to clarify the subject:
Note that
InformationArchitect is quite different from
ChiefArchitect. IA is a discipline that focuses on the user-side of the equation: How information is organized, what tools are at users' disposal to help them organize their own knowledge, et cetera. It is quite divorced from the question of technical implementation, which is what a
ChiefArchitect is ostensibly supposed to guide.
BehavioralEffectOfMetrics has an interesting tale where the choice of metrics produced different results.
more discussion over on
MeatBall:
http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?InformationArchitecture
What does "information architect" really mean? Place your
WikiWeightedVote here:
- Glorified DBA [733]
- UML analysis supremo [62]
- Web designer/XML freak [223]
- Librarian [133]
- Movie Director wanting to get into "multimedia" [52]
- Something completely different [1009]
- Web site organizer [9]
- Data encoding system design specialist [7]
- All of the above [7]
Place a 9 for "completely agree", and 0 for "entirely disagree" in each case.
Feel free to add your own categories above.
Maybe the question should be
"What kind of information do we want to architect?"
- information spaces which are (semi-)permanent
- information spaces which get a lot of use
Any brickie's labourer could slap up a building with the help of some mates and an offer of a kegger, but would they have the same designed elegance of achitectured spaces? Not that all architectured spaces are always better, unfortunately.
See also:
ArchitectingWord,
ConceptualIntegrity,
ArchitectAsKeeperOfTheFlame,
ChiefArchitect,
WebsitePatterns
CategoryInformation,
CategoryInformationEngineering