Workshop type: Online workshop

As knowledge graphs bubble up into popular and business consciousness (lots of chatter on social media, recent articles in Forbes and the WSJ) it seems fitting to ask how this technology is relevant to the IA community (it is!) and provide an introduction to graph-curious IAs.

This half-day workshop will cover:

1) An introduction and definitions: what is a knowledge graph? Is it an ontology? Is it a graph database? What’s the difference?
2) Introduction to and overview of relevant technologies (graph databases and other interfaces)
3) How this technology is relevant to the practice of IA
4) A short hands-on activity to reinforce concepts and get attendees thinking in graphs

This workshop at is aimed at IAs who are interested in this topic but perhaps don’t know how to get started.

Does information architecture have core values? Should it? What would those values be?

In recent years, ethics, inclusivity, and social responsibility have come to the fore as key issues in the information architecture, UX, and design fields. As practitioners, we want to uphold our ideals while balancing the demands of industry and the needs of diverse stakeholders. We are challenged to establish an identity for information architecture as a mature, ethical, and responsible field. This requires us to reflect, personally and collaboratively, upon the values that shape our practice.

Open to anyone with an interest in information architecture, the IA Roundtable is an annual event that aims to shape the discipline of information architecture by gathering practitioners, researchers, and educators to discuss critical aspects of our discipline and share what is discussed with the IA community. Join a dynamic collection of adventurers, thought leaders, and other curious folks for a lively, highly participatory roundtable.

This year’s IA Roundtable will focus on the topic of values in information architecture. We will use a short series of lightning talks and exercises to ground ourselves in relevant frameworks, perspectives, and experiences. The group will then work together to make sense of this topic and co-create shareable artifacts that support wider conversations about values in information architecture.

For those who want to take the results even further, we invite you to an informal strategy session and “make-a-thon” on the following day, Wednesday, April 15, from 9am to 2pm (exact times and location to be announced). Based on Tuesday’s Roundtable, we will create posters for the IA Conference Poster Night and discuss other ideas on how to extend conversations like this one into the world beyond the walls of the conference.

Join us and bring creative new ideas to life that you can develop, apply, and promote in your own practice! See http://iaroundtable.org for more details about this year’s topic, call for lightning talks, and the history of previous IA Roundtable events since 2013.

More of our transactions and social interactions are moving online every day. People access these digital products and services using a growing variety of devices: notebook computers, mobile phones, wearables, voice-driven smart assistants, and more. Good experience requires that these systems be coherent and understandable. As a result, information architecture (IA) is more important today than ever before.

This full-day workshop is an introduction to information architecture by one of the co-authors of the fourth edition of the polar bear book.

The workshop is divided into four parts:

- Part 1 introduces information architecture
- Part 2 covers conceptual modeling, which is foundational to good IA
- Part 3 reviews the standard components used to implement information architectures
- Part 4 describes essential skills one must master to actually do IA

Hands-on exercises give participants a direct practical understanding of key IA concepts.

This immersive workshop provides practical tactics for designing, building and maintaining taxonomies and ontologies. Based on hard-won lessons learned from work with everything from large fortune-50 enterprises to small ecommerce sites.

The workshop provides:

• Taxonomy/Ontology basics: a foundation to start creating a consistent vocabulary within your organization. We also call out the unique needs of building a taxonomy to serve the needs of large enterprises.
• A framework for shifting to an enterprise taxonomy model that meets the needs of your enterprise and the individual business units, systems, user profiles, and interfaces.
• Discussion of the impacts of a taxonomy project on technology, governance, workflows, marketing, analytics, search, compliance, and the interaction with master data management
• Practical tips for providing stakeholders with resources to navigate internal tensions around implementation
• Examples and case studies of large scale enterprise taxonomy projects.