Search Systems, Thesauri, Controlled Vocabularies, and Metadata, Design and Documentation

Target Audience

This website is designed for selling cartoons and Japanese Anime features. Nowadays, those thing became more and more popular. There are Comi-cons in every country, even the grown ups are mad for these stuffs.

Basically, the target audiences of this website are little kids and anime fans. In fact, there are a lot of people selling these figures , models and little accessory on eBay or Amazon. But the prize is a bit high and they are all overseas, the shipment is usually over 2 weeks. For this reason, build a local online retail store might draw these people's attention.

In order to satisfy the users' interest, the website will have a complete category and items list. So that people will find exactly what they need.

Blueprint

Here is a blueprint diagram of my website:

In Product category, I’m using index terms navigation, and of course there will be preview pictures of each items. In my personal opinion, hierarchical type of browsing and index items form of navigation is probably the most fit type based on the subject of this particular website.

Create wire-frames

Homepage

Registration Page

Navigation Page (Sale Items)

Metadata Matrix

This table describe the popular searched word might be used in the search bar.

Vocabulary	Description	Example	Maintenance
Figure	Models & Character Figures	Robot, Model	Medium
Magazines	Monthly Magazines	Anime Magazines	Medium
Manga	Comic Books	Naruto, One Piece	High
Accessories	Featured Goods	Ring, Necklace	Low

Navigation and Labelling System

Here is the Home Page of Google.com

Label	Destination’s Heading Label	Destination’s <title> Label
+You	Start Google+	Google+
Search	Google Search	Google
Images	Google Images	Google Images
Maps	Google Maps	Google Maps
Play	Google Play	Google Play
YouTube	YouTube Website	YouTube
News	News	Google News
Gmail	Gmail	Gmail: Email From Google
Drive	Google Drive	Google Drive
Calendar	Google Calendar	Google Calendar
More	More Google Tools	Google
Sign In	Sign in Google Account	Google

a. What labels you did not like and why, and suggest improvements.

Actually I think all of them are good. Maybe the only flaw is user cannot really customize the Tool Bar.

b. Whether there were any inconsistencies in the labelling system between the pages (in terms of style, presentation, syntax, granularity, comprehensiveness and audience).

Cannot really find one.

c. Examine at least two other similar or competing web sites. How similar are the labelling systems? Is any one site clearly the winner(and if so, why)?

Well, I have to say, bing's Homepage looks much attractive. Especially the pop up on the bottom of the page. But overall, the labelling system is similar to Google.

If I remembered correctly, Yahoo's searching page has the old Google Homepage style. Put everything together at the mid of the webpage. About the labelling system, doesn't look much different.

To sum up, those three search engine basically have the similar system. So there really isn't a clearly winner.

d. Look at how other students have answered this question and comment on their blogs.

Organisation of certain phrase

Arrange the following list in alphabetical order, then answer the questions below:

• El Paso, Texas
• Saint Nicholas, Belgium
• The Lord of the Rings
• Newark, New Jersey
• XVIIme siècle
• .38 Special
• St. Louis, Missouri
• New York, New York
• 1001 Arabian Nights
• The 1-2-3 of Magic
• Albany, New York
• #!%&: Creating Comic Books
• The Hague, Netherlands
• $35 a Day Through Europe
• H20: The Beauty of Water
• Plzen, Czech Republic

Here is my answer.

• #!%&: Creating Comic Books
• $35 a Day Through Europe
• .38 Special
• 1-2-3 of Magic, The
• XVIIme siècle
• 1001 Arabian Nights
• Albany, New York
• El Paso, Texas
• H20: The Beauty of Water
• Lord of the Rings, The
• Newark, New Jersey
• New York, New York
• Plzen, Czech Republic
• Saint Nicholas, Belgium
• St. Louis, Missouri
• The Hague, Netherlands

a. Did you put The Hague under T or H?

Under T.

b. Did you put El Paso under E or P?

Under E.        

c. Which came first in your list, Newark or New York?

Newark.   

d. Does St. Louis come before or after Saint Nicholas?

St.Louis come after Saint Nicholas because letter 't' comes after letter 'a'.

e. How did you handle numbers, punctuation, and special characters?

Put them at the top of the list. Usually, special characters come first.

f. Assuming the italicised terms are book titles, what might be a more useful way to organise this list?

Arrange them into two different list.

g. If the cities represent places you've visited and the book titles are ones you've read, how could chronology be used to order the list in a more meaningful way?

Use chronology to determine the years of where I went or what I read.

h.    Look at how some of the other students have organised this information and comment on their blogs

Information Architect

When people heard the word ‘architecture’, the first relative thing pop into their heads is probably design. So what is information architecture? Is this about designing information? Well, it’s not wrong, but not totally correct. Information architecture is about organizing data for websites, intranets and any other kind of information. In other words, some sort of art science of information structure.

When we are developing a website, the designing phase is very important, because the first judgment from audiences is based on the interface of the website. From my point of view, a web programmer needs not only a good understanding of Java Scripts, but also a very high skill of designing. In the development of a web site, information architect needs to clearly put different elements in the correct place, such as navigation bar. This is not an easy job, like I said. A little disorder might cause some bad impression on audiences. In my opinion, a good architect needs to design something feast one’s eye. For this reason, an information architect plays a very essential role in the web site development.

Understanding of Web 3.0 (The Semantic Web)

According to the information that I found on the internet, I think that Web 3.0 will improve people’s experience on the internet. First of all, Web 3.0 such as semantic web is trying to transfer internet into metadata. Usually, websites are designed for people not machines. But semantic web is trying to let machines can understand website, too. Meanwhile, instead of using human resource to do all the job, semantic web is making machines to perform more of the tedious work. For this reason, when people are using internet, they will find it is much easier to find and share information.

In semantic web, privacy becomes more important because sharing information has become easier and during the process of sharing or finding, it is hard to protect user’s privacy.

There is no doubt to say that technology is moving towards artificial intelligence. By that time, people might be talking to a machine on the internet or even in the real life. My point of view is using the semantic web is a part of the evaluation. It is true that this world will be filled with intelligent machines, and human beings won’t participate into any more meaningless works. But this evaluation of humanity probably needs decades or centuries. I think people will definitely work through this problem which letting machines taking place of some important positions, but still keep our original humanity.

My experience of using Pixiv Website

I use this community website called Pixiv, it is for artists to upload their works and share with others. In the Privacy Policy, it says they only use private information for the following purposes:

( 1 )  In order to provide this service.

( 2 )  In order to charge users who use the paid service.

( 3 )  As determining data for improvement of this service, additional of a new service or publication or delivery of advertisements considering users' age, gender and interests.

( 4 )  In order to prevent usage violating the terms of use of this service.

( 5 )  In order to gather statistical data of users' usage (In case of making such data, data shall be modified in order not to identify an individual).

The funny thing is I can’t really find any information about if there is a breach in security on their site. But it does ask the users to keep their account and password safe. What I’m thinking is Pixiv is all about free sharing art works. And it indicates that no one shall use anything from this website to make profits. If this website got hacked, they will probably do their best to preserve those data won’t be deleted. To be honest, there is really no point to breach into a non-profit community website.

I’m really enjoying use Pixiv, it really protects every users’ privacy and intellectual property. If any Pixiv users find someone else is using their art works without permission. They could file a complaint to Pixiv, and staffs from Pixiv will help to handle the case.

Strength and weakness of RSS

During the last week, I used RSS to subscribe Yahoo News. At first, I didn’t know what exactly RSS means. In my opinion, it is something like subscribe to Youtube Channel or Like on the Facebook Page. But after using RSS for a week, I feel it is much more like news aggregators. It always updates the latest news or other website stuffs for me. In a good way, I can know the latest news as soon as possible and it also gives me interesting information that I didn’t expected. Unlike the E-mail notification, it won’t be spam for me. In addition, the RSS only shows News article. Instead of pictures and videos, it only shows the key point.

However, E-mails are much more popular than RSS now which means there isn’t a lot of website still using RSS system. For example, if I want to get the Dominos’ Pizza coupon, I have to subscribe with my E-mail address. And also, the RSS won’t save the notification for a long time. I can’t read the RSS from three days ago. This might also be a weakness for the RSS system.