Organization Systems
# Organization Systems
# Design Decisions in Organizing Systems
# What is Being Organized
A resource can be organized, must be identified. When the resources being organized consist of information content, it can be challenging to decide on the unit of organization.
# Why is it Being Organized
While all organizing systems describe and arrange resources so they can be located and accessed later, they can be distinguished by their typical purposes or by the priority of their purposes.
When the scale of the collection or the number of intended users increases, two things can happen. The first is that if the system can turn its interaction traces into interaction resources, additional value can be created by analyzing these resources to enhance the interactions, to suggest new ones, or make predictions about how individual users or groups of them will behave. A second likely outcome of increasing the number of resources or users is some conflict between users because they are unlikely to have the same goals and design preferences.
# How much is it Being Organized
Not all resources should be accorded the same degree of organization. Not all resources in a collection require the same degree of description because organizing systems exist for different purposes and to support different kinds of interactions or functions. This can be seen by considering two ends of the “degree of description” continuum. Similar resources need to be grouped or classified to emphasize the most important distinctions among the complete set of resources in the collection.
# When is it Being Organized
# 'On the way in' or 'On the way out'
"On the way in" organization can be exemplified by the organization an author imposes on a document through the title, section headings, typographic conventions, page numbers, and other mechanisms that identify its parts and their relationships to each other.
"On the way out" makes organizing systems can retrieve highly relevant results in response to a user’s query while accounting for the individual’s search history and current context.
# How or by Whom is it Being Organized
Resources can be organized by the people who create them, by the people who use them, by people trained as professional organizers, by computational agents, or by any combination of these methods.
# Where is it Being Organized
# Physical resources vs. Digital resources
Physical resources are often stored where it is convenient, in warehouses, offices, storerooms, shelves, cabinets, and closets, and it might not be possible to design a new storage space. However, adapting an organizing system to the characteristics of its physical environment could undermine architectural thinking and make it harder to maintain the organization over time if the collection evolves in scope and scale.
Digital resources, on the other hand, are frequently organized and stored “in the cloud.” While their physical location is often invisible and irrelevant, digital resources exist in the physical location of the data centers and servers that store and process them. This is important to remember because their physical location determines the legal and regulatory environment governing the resources, and it can vary by city, state, province, and country.
# The power and Politics of Organizing
Organizing systems and technology are not developed in a vacuum. They are shaped by politics, social context, and biases of the people who create them. Technology innovators who say their goals are to make something faster, smaller, or cheaper often ignore the possibility that their innovations will make certain types of work less economically viable or discriminate against people who lack the education or skills to use the new technology.
# Activities in Organizing Systems
Four activities occur in every organizing system: resource selection, organization, interaction design, and maintenance.
- Resource Selection - Determining the scope of the organizing system by specifying which resources to include.
- Organization - Specifying the principles or rules that determine the arrangement of the resources.
- Interaction Design - Designing and implementing the actions, functions or services that make use of the resources.
- Maintenance - Managing and adapting the resources, the organization imposed on them, and the interactions with them as needed.
# Resource Selection
The most fundamental decision for an organizing system is determining the resource domain: the group or type of resources that are being organized. Selection is first shaped by the domain and then by the scope of the organizing system. The scope can be analyzed through six interrelated aspects:
- the size of the collection,
- the number and nature of the users,
- the expected changes to the collection,
- the lifetime over which the organizing system is expected to operate,
- the physical or technological environment in which the organizing system is situated or implemented, and
- the relationship of the organizing system to others that overlap with it in domain or scope.
# Selection Criteria
# Looking "Upstream" and "Downstream" to Select Resources
Upstream: Using the analogy of a river, we can follow a resource “upstream” from us until we find the “headwaters.”
Downstream: Analyzing any evidence or records of their use or interactions as they flow downstream. Other selection processes look “downstream” to select resources using predicted rather than current properties, capability, or suitability. (When you cannot obtain resources directly from their source/ data becomes 'dirty' or 'noisy')
# Organization
Organizing systems arrange resources according to many different principles. The simplest principle for organizing resources is colocation -- putting all the resources of some type in the same location. Some generic organizing principles like alphabetic or chronological order can apply to almost every type of resource because most resources have names or dates associated with them.
Other organizing principles are more specific because they are based on the properties that distinguish one type of resource from another.
Definition
Property
If multiple values are possible, the property is called an “attribute,” “dimension,” or “variable.” Feature is used in data science and machine learning contexts for both “raw” or observable variables and “latent” ones, extracted or constructed from the original set.
# Organizing Physical Resources
# Organizing with Properties of Physical Resources
Physical resources are often organized according to intrinsic physical properties like their size, color, or shape because the human visual system automatically pays a lot of attention to these properties.
# Organizing with Descriptions of Physical Resources
To overcome the inherent constraints of organizing physical resources, organizing systems often use resource descriptions of the primary physical ones. For example, a book can be listed in many bibliographies at the same time.
# Organizing Places
# Organizing the Land
Cities naturally emerge in places that can support life and commerce. Almost all major cities are built on coasts or rivers because water enables agriculture, transportation, and power for industrial development.
# Organizing Built Environments
Built environments influence the expectations, behaviors, and experiences of everyone who enters the space. Employees, visitors, customers, and inhabitants are all subject to the design of the spaces they occupy.
# Organizing Digital Resources
Information resources in either physical or digital form are typically organized using intrinsic properties,assigned properties, behavioral or transactional properties.
An organizing system for digital resources can also use digital description resources that are associated with them.
# Organizing Web-based Resources
The Domain Name System (DNS) is the foundation for organizing web resources.
# “Information Architecture” and Organizing Systems
architectures: Abstract patterns of information content and organization
Information architecture is designing an abstract and effective organization of information and then exposing that organization to facilitate navigation and information use.
Information architecture implies a methodology for the design of user interfaces and interactions that puts conceptual modeling at the foundation.
# Organizing People
Organizing the people who work in a business is often called “human resource management.” People are usually organized according to their roles in business processes and strategy.
# Organizing with Multiple Resource Properties
Multiple properties of the resources, the person organizing or intending to use them, and the social and technological environment in which they are organized can collectively shape their organization. If multiple resource properties are considered in a fixed order, the resulting arrangement forms a logical hierarchy. An alternative to hierarchical organization is faceted classification, in which the different properties of the resources can be evaluated in any order. Faceted classification allows a collection of description resources to be dynamically re-organized into as many categories as there are combinations of values on the descriptive facets, depending on the priority or point of view the user applies to the facets.
# Interaction Design
With physical resources, it is easy to distinguish the interactions that are designed into and directly supported by an organizing system because of intentional acts of description or arrangement from those that can take place with resources after they have been accessed. In contrast, in organizing systems that contain digital resources the logical boundary between the resources and their interactions is less clear because what you can do with a digital resource is often not apparent.
# Affordance and Capability
Affordance : the idea that physical resources and their environments have inherent actionable properties that determine, in conjunction with an actor’s capabilities and cognition, what can be done with the resource. (might not be tied to any useful interaction.)
The capability of digital resources and information systems can roughly be assessed by counting the number of associated functions, services, or application program interfaces.
# Interaction and Value Creation
A useful way to distinguish types of interactions is according to the way in which they create value.
# Value Creation with Physical Resources
Physical manipulation is often the intrinsic type of interaction with collections of physical resources. In some organizing systems robotic devices, computational processes, or other entities that can act autonomously with no need for a human agent carry out interactions with physical resources.
# Value Creation with Digital Resources
With digital resources, neither physical manipulation nor interpersonal contact is required to exchange information or symbolically manipulate the information contained in the resource.
# Accessibility
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recognizes accessibility to information and communications technologies as a basic human right.
# Access Policies
Different levels of access can apply to different resources and interactions in a collection or to different categories of users.
# Maintenance
Maintenance includes the work to preserve resources, the processes for reevaluating and revising selection criteria, and the removal of unneeded resources from the system. Maintenance and selection are interdependent, and more stringent rules for selecting resources imply a maintenance plan that carefully enforces the same constraints that limit selection. Ideally, maintenance requirements for resources should be anticipated when organizing principles are defined and implemented.
# Motivations for Maintaining Resources
The concept of memory institution broadly applies to a great many organizing systems that share the goal of preserving knowledge and cultural heritage.
# Preservation
At the most basic level, preservation of resources means maintaining them in conditions that protect them from deterioration.
# Digitization and Preserving Resources
Preservation is often a key motive for digitization, but digitization alone is not preservation. Digitization creates preservation challenges because technological obsolescence of computer software and hardware require ongoing efforts to ensure digitized resources can be accessed.
# Preserving the Web
Preservation of web resources is inherently problematic.
# Preserving Resource Instances
A focus on preserving particular resource instances is most apparent in museums and archives, where collections typically consist of unique and original items.
# Preserving Resource Types and Classes
In contrast to museums, libraries, especially public ones, tend to focus on preserving resource classes rather than individual instances.
# Preserving Resource Collections
In some organizing systems, any specific resource might be of little interest or importance in its own right but is valuable because of its membership in a collection of essentially identical items. This is the situation in the data warehouses used by businesses to identify trends in customer or transaction data or in the huge data collections created by scientists.
# Curation
Curation refers to the processes by which a resource in a collection is maintained over time, and it occurs in all organizing systems.
# Institutional Curation
Curation might be thought of as an ongoing or deferred selection activity because curation decisions must often be made on an item-by-item basis.
# Social and Web Curation
Given the web’s decentralized nature, it is often difficult to determine which resources are original, authoritative, or authorized versions. Some take advantage of this by deliberately misclassifying, falsifying, or otherwise maliciously tampering with resources.
# Computational Curation
Search engines continuously curate the web because the algorithms they use for computing relevance and ranking determine what resources people are likely to access. At a smaller scale, there are many kinds of tools for managing the quality of a website, such as ensuring that HTML content is valid, that links work, and that the site is being crawled completely.
# Discarding, Removing, and Not Keeping
An essential part of maintenance is the phasing out of resources that are damaged, expired, past their effectivity dates, no longer relevant to any interaction, or otherwise unusable. Information resources are often discarded to comply with laws about retaining sensitive data.
# Governance
Governance overlaps with curation in meaning, but typically has more of policy focus (what should be done), rather than a process focus (how to do it).
# Governance in Business Organizing Systems
Governance is essential to deal with the frequent changes in business organizing systems and the associated activities of data quality management, access control to ensure security and privacy, compliance, deletion, and archiving.
# Governance in Scientific Organizing Systems
Scientific data poses special governance problems because of its enormous scale, which dwarfs the datasets managed in most business organizing systems.