A Project of |
Guidelines | Rants | Patterns | Poems | Services | Classes | Press | Blog | Resources | About Us | Site Map |
Home > Rants > Goodbye documents, hello objects. > Modeling informative objects |
How to build the model: What is an informative object? Define entities and other alien creatures Describe what you create--with metadata |
Modeling informative objects
You should wade into modeling, up to your hips. Informative objects are lively chunks of content, ready to be managed by your system, delivered to your customers. Why bother to model your information?
You should catalog all the types of information that you have lying around--and any types that you realize you ought to create from this moment on. You are not making a list of all the documents on the shelf. You are identifying the categories of information-the types. Your aim: to define a standard structure for each type of information, described in formal terms, so that even a piece of software can locate the components, move through them, sort them, transform them, and deliver them in many formats. You are defining the meaningful structure of a genre, such as a procedure, not the format. How the pieces are usually organized into wholes. What each piece does, not what it looks like. You are articulating a pattern. |
Related articles: Complexity theory as a way of understanding the Web Structuring complex interactive information Modeling information in electronic space What kind of thing am I creating? (Full chapter from Hot Text, in PDF, 728K, or 12 minutes at 56K) |
Home |
Guidelines |
Rants |
Patterns |
Poems |
Services |
Classes |
Press |
Blog |
Web
Writing that Works!
|