This index is generated from the set of concepts referred to by the articles on this website.
The activity is the part of project scaffold which is associated with time. Its purpose is to act as an account of work that has been completed, as well as schedule work that can be completed, and project future expansion.
An affordance is a concept from cognitive science that identifies the potential of an object, that is, what a person can do with it. It is the complement of a constraint.
An affordance is a concept from cognitive science that identifies the potential of an object, that is, what a person can do with it. It is the opposite of a constraint.
An API is, in the most generic sense, a published commitment on the part of a person or business entity to expose certain functionality, behavior, or semantics of an information system under their control. In the sense in which we are more accustomed, an API refers to a specific class of software that implements this functionality on the Web.
In Alan Cooper's architect-engineer-programmer framework (from lecture Imagine This, 2002), the architect is responsible for the overall design of a software system.
Artificial intelligence can be understood as an umbrella term for computers behaving in (adaptive) ways they were not explicitly programmed to behave. Machine learning is one particular subfield of (and strategy for) artificial intelligence.
The client is a party to an agreement to exchange professional services for payment — the client being the one paying.
In the proposed process model, the composition is the pairing of the form and the context. The composition comprises the salient body of work initiated by the architect on behalf of the client.
A computation is a known operation over known information that reveals latent information. (Claude Shannon)
Conceptual integrity (Brooks 1975) is the state of affairs wherein a project or its ultimate product(s), and everybody involved, has a unified mental model of what it is and what it's for. Achieving conceptual integrity means decisions come easier and outcomes are more coherent, because there is little to no ambiguity around an optimal course of action.
In the parlance of design, a constraint is any construct that either inhibits or prohibits certain activity within a given context. Constraints also exist within the process of design itself, such as those of resources like time and money, which often dictate the course of action. The complement of a constraint is called an affordance.
The customer is whoever purchases goods or services from the client.
A digital media insider is a person whose business has something to do with digital media.
A feed is a kind of information resource that represents a sequence of publication releases of other resources. Feeds are typically implemented in RSS (less commonly RDF Site Summary 1.0, and more commonly Dave Winer's unrelated Really Simple Syndication 2.0), as well as the IETF standard, Atom (RFC4287).
A file is an opaque blob—a segment of bytes—with a name.
In the proposed process model, a fitness variable is an affirmative statement derived from evidence gathered in the context, which is construed as a statement of fact. It is a tighter statement than a requirement insofar as it has specific constraints on its language and scope.
In the proposed process model, the form is the part of the composition that complements the context — it is ultimately what the client seeks to acquire and what the architect seeks to define. The form also refers to the part of the project scaffold that is home to successive incarnations of what is to become the finished product, including the product itself.
This concept was imagined once very briefly many years ago to consider the study of heterogeneous information ecosystems.
An information resource is a distinct, identifiable object that carries information. On a website, a resource is uniquely identifiable by a URI, aka Web address. On our project, the resource is the basic unit of visible progress. Pages are resources, so are images, videos, etc. Resources can also be the interfaces to programs, take parameters, and process input.
Intension is the meaning of a semantic relation.
An isomorphism can be understood as a perfect, 1:1 relation between two sets, such that every element in one set has exactly one counterpart in the other. In computing, an isomorphism is the pair of operations that transform the elements from one set to the other. For example, the "zip" and "unzip" algorithms, together, form an isomorphism.
A live document is one that is continually maintained, updated, and expanded, and so the expectation set is that anything read in it now may be changed later on.
Machine learning refers to the use of statistical methods to program computers. It is typically what people mean by the term "artificial intelligence".
When a piece of content is machine-actionable (computable), it means that either is or contains formal syntax and semantics that can be directly accessed by a computer program without any additional processing or interpretation.
Opacity is the property of an information resource from the point of view of the surrounding information system, such that the latter cannot, or at least does not, "see into" the `resource. As such, an opaque resource has to have a canonical representation, such as a literal byte segment. A transparent resource, by contrast, may have arbitrarily many equivalent representations.
In interaction design, a persona is a user archetype synthesized from research (interviews, surveys, ethnographic studies) on real users. Personas are crafted to make tangible targets for design interventions.
Post-industrial activity (economic or otherwise) is that which is concerned chiefly with organizing, disseminating, and manipulating information, in contrast to industrial activity which is concerned with doing the same with matter.
In Fred Brooks' producer-director model (from Why Did the Tower of Babel Fail?) of partitioning organizational power, the producer is the one who is ultimately responsible for organizing the resources necessary to carry out an endeavour.
A product can be understood as either a class or instance of a commercial offering where the majority of the vendor's outlay is done in advance, often speculatively and in bulk, like the creation of an artifact.
In Alan Cooper's architect-engineer-programmer framework (from lecture Imagine This, 2002), the programmer's role is to implement the synthesis of the architect's design and the engineer's technical strategy.
The project scaffold is the central interim artifact of the proposed process model. It is a live document initiated by the architect on behalf of the client. It is designed to retain all relevant information to the project, account for all resources invested, communicate progress to the client, and defend the course of action to the client and the rest of the production team.
The reference either contains or otherwise bookmarks all inert information surrounding the project. That is, there are no action items to be found in the reference except those intended to keep its contents up to date. An essential component of the reference is the lexicon, which houses definitions for all terms of art associated with the project.
A representation (of a Web resource) refers to the literal sequence of bits that comes out of an HTTP response. It could be a file, or it could be the output of a program. A resource can have multiple representations that vary along a number of dimensions (e.g. language, content type). The process of choosing a representation of a resource is called content negotiation.
A representational artifact (a term coined by designer Donald Norman in the book Things That Make Us Smart), is an artifact (ie a thing made by a person) that is principally representational, that is, it is intended to stand in for, or represent something else.
The purpose of a scenario is to expose individuals’ interactions with a potential software product. This generates questions of feasibility, viability and desirability, and affords an architect to refine his or her understanding of the situation. A scenario will typically contain several distinct interactions which can be identified and extracted.
Semiotics is the study of signs.
In computing, state can be understood as the sum total of all the information needed to reconstruct a process at a particular instant. This in principle makes state an observable, describable, quantifiable object, and potentially an addressable information resource in its own right.
A uniform resource identifier is exactly what the name says: an identifier (text symbol) for (information, chiefly) resources which is (syntactically) uniform.
In the software industry, people who interact with software products are called users. Users are not always customers, but occasionally can be members of the client.