Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Paul Hagon – Enriching large data sets

Paul Hagon PortraitLibraries contain masses of beautifully structured data collected over many years. But these records may have their flaws and might now want to be used in ways, such as location based services, that weren’t imagined 30 years ago. How can we use existing API’s and web services to enrich this data to enable it to be used in a variety of ways. This data also needs to be exposed for others to use and build upon. With the recent release of the Government response to the Web 2.0 taskforce, how can institutions comply with these recommendations by providing their data in usable forms for the public. What’s involved in building an API into our resources and how can our data be given more meaning through semantic linkages like RDFa?

Knud Möller – RDFa everywhere

Knud Möller PortraitIn this talk, an overview will be given of the RDFa technology in general, followed by an outline of its latest developments, such as the RDFa API and the definition of RDFa Core.

Donna Spencer – Information seeking behaviours

Donna Spencer PortraitEach information seeking behaviour needs very different approaches to information architecture, information design and page layout. During this presentation, Donna will talk about each information behaviour, its key attributes, key design needs, and show good and bad examples of each.

Rashmi Sinha – The perils of popularity

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 27 2007.

Rashmi Sinha PortraitCan web-based social systems with their wide reach, user-generated and user-filtered content harness the wisdom of crowds? Duncan Watts’ recent experiments reveal how popularity based web social systems can throw up fickle, random trends that are essentially unreplicable, and only tangentially related to quality. However, popularity as a way to filter information continues to rise in popularity – replacing hierarchical menus, overtaking tags, and even used in lieu of relevance. Rashmi will link decades of psychology research on group decision making and social influence to what is happening on the web today. She will discuss different models of popularity based filtering such as Digg and YouTube. What are ways to avoid the Watts dilemma – including Google’s model of sociality, tag-based social systems, and object-based social networks. She will present some principles for the design of web social systems and how there were used in the design of SlideShare and discuss how SlideShare as an evolving social system handles popularity.

Andy Clarke – Creating Inspired Design

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.

Andy Clarke Portrait

Designers are more than mere pixel pushers. The role of the creative designer working on the web has changed and will continue to change faster than ever before. In this session, Andy Clarke will discuss how designers should now play the pivotal part in the creation of engaging user experiences, binding together the roles of information architects, content authors and technical developers. It’s time to put designers in the hot seat.

Thomas Vander Wal – IA for the “Come to Me Web”

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.

Thomas Vander Wal Portrait

In this specialised session Thomas gets us up to speed with his "Come to Me Web" framework for structuring information and web sites. This framework includes the "Model of Attraction", Personal InfoCloud, and Folksonomy. This ads the focus of designing and developing for information use across devices and context. With this framework we can consider mobile, broadband, web storage and personal off-line storage of information and its implications as we structure our information and sites.

Donna Maurer – IA: a “how to”

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 29 2006.

Donna Maurer Portrait

There are 2 aspects to making IA work in a project – an understanding of the key principles of information architecture and a knowledge of activities to put them into practice. This presentation will examine the “how to’s” of information architecture. We’ll look at how to take a content inventory, analyse content, conduct card sorting, analyse user research, choose the right structure, create an information architecture and test it. These activities drive an informed design process so you can be confident in your decisions and communicate them to other people.

Thomas Vander Wal – IA for Web Developers

A presentation given at Web Directions South, Sydney Australia, September 28 2006.

Thomas Vander Wal Portrait

Thomas will provide an overview of information architecture for web designers and developers. He will cover the what and why, with a sprinkling of how. Knowing how to work with an information architect or how to build the skills into your role will be covered.

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Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney