In episode 80 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Sarah O’Keefe discuss information architecture in DITA XML and other forms.
“You have to look at information architecture in metadata starting from a taxonomy point of view. This means you are looking at the structure of the content as well as the organization of the data that’s used for search and filtering.”
—Gretyl Kinsey

Related links: 

* Making metadata in DITA work for you

Twitter handles:

* @gretylkinsey
* @sarahokeefe

Transcript:
Gretyl Kinsey:                   Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we discuss information architecture in DITA XML and other forms.
GK:                   Hello and welcome. I’m Gretyl Kinsey.
Sarah O’Keefe:                   And I’m Sarah O’Keefe.
GK:                   Today, we’re going to be talking about information architecture. So I think the best place to start is just defining broadly what information architecture is.
SO:                   And that sounds so simple and yet we’re going to hit our first snag, because if you go look at this, you’ll discover that everybody in content across all the different aspects of it has an opinion about what constitutes information architecture. I think probably the easiest place to start is to say that if you’re looking at a website, then the way that that website is organized and structured and how the content is hierarchical, you start at the top, you go to the about page, you drill down to the team or the company history, that’s information architecture.
GK:                   Right. And that can extend not just to the way a website is organized, but whatever your delivery method is. So the same thing, if you’ve got a print-based piece of content, it’s that hierarchy, it’s how is it organized into maybe chapters or parts, and that really can apply across all different types of content. I think this is a good place to mention that it is really important to know your terminology and define it, because when you’ve got lots of different types of content that you might be working with, you might get some confusion going on if you don’t really clearly define what IA means.
SO:                   Right. Exactly. And we’ve had some kind of hilarious run ins with this, where we’re sitting in a meeting and we’re talking about information architecture and what we mean is how things are encoded in the DITA files, which we’ll get to in a minute, and it turns out that our counterparts in let’s say content design or UX or something like that are thinking much more about the website delivery layer and nobody is thinking about the print, right? So we have to really be careful about this and be careful to make sure that when we say IA, that we know which one we’re talking about and at which level.
GK:                   Absolutely. You did mention DITA, so I want to talk about that next. So what is the difference when you’re talking about DITA-specific IA? How would you define that?
SO:                   So in DITA, when we talk about information architecture, what we’re usually referring to is how exactly are we structuring the content and marking it up in DITA. So which topic types are you using and what goes into each kind of a topic? Let’s say you have a bunch of reference information. Well, the decision to, for example,