Statement of Competency: PLO A

PLO A: Apply technology informatics skills to solve specific industry data and information management problems, with a focus on usability and designing for users.

This PLO can be broken into three parts:

  1. Technology informatics skills
  2. Industry data and information management problems
  3. Usability and designing for users

What are technology informatics skills? To approach this question, we must first define Informatics, which is still a new enough field within Information Studies to require a clear definition. San Jose State University’s iSchool defines Informatics as “the science, practice, or process of collecting, organizing, storing, analyzing, preserving, retrieving, and governing data and records relevant to an organization” (2018). This definition reveals Informatics’ roots in Library Science. To me, Informatics can be simply defined as applied Information Science, or as Library Science applied to more modern applications in which server farms and relational databases replace brick and mortar libraries and search engines replace dutiful librarians.

Westra and Delaney, in defining Informatics competencies for nursing and healthcare leaders, categorize informatics skills as “management, system requirements and selection, design and development, fiscal management, implementation, analysis and evaluation, and system maintenance” (2008). While the needs of all organizations are different, these skills are generally a necessary part of the skillset needed to implement an effective data governance program at an organization. Our textbook in INFM 200—Sousa and Oz’s Management Information Systems—focuses on the design and development, the fiscal management, the system requirements and selection, and the rough implementation of a useful information gathering and processing system in the context of a restaurant and all of the data that could be gathered from the digital cash register and user behaviors. The sections in this text and course that were particularly interesting to me were those dealing with classification and taxonomy.

I will introduce Classification and Taxonomy by citing my discussion post on this topic from INFO 200-Informatics Fundamentals:

How would you advance with the development of a taxonomy/classification scheme for an organization?

“When building a new database, users must first build a schema (from the Greek word for ‘plan’). The schema describes the structure of the database being designed: the names and types of fields in each record type and the general relationships among different sets of records or files” (Sousa, Oz, 2015, p. 233).

This really depends on what kind of organization we’re talking about. But, in general, I would opt for using a taxonomy/classification system that is consistent with existing taxonomy/classification systems from other, similar organizations. For example, if I were developing this system for an e-commerce website, I would recommend that we base our taxonomy/classification system on Amazon’s or EBay’s classification system. This way, Google would recognize our attributes and category names and “understand” our data.

Source: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRftVj84mj_NEns50I9RmRi4sNok_QysjnJxOqlsz5P2Va-3cQPo2ASnY1BJR6xoXqDyAahlrffrLAf/pub?embedded=true

In this post, I draw from our textbook by Sousa and Oz to make the case for consistency and universality in the development of classification and taxonomical systems. In short, I argue that classification systems and taxonomies should use attribute naming and taxonomical structure consistent with other similar systems within a particular field or business category. Borrowing from Library Science, I ultimately argue for one classification and taxonomical system to rule them all—or at least to rule each field or business category. After all, imagine the chaos and information-ineffectiveness of a world in which each library classified books differently, with different category names and numbers! To an information architect, such a world is unthinkable. The necessity of classification and taxonomical consistency is even more necessary on the Internet, where all libraries are essentially combined, and categories and attribute names unite seemingly disparate collections into large, searchable, subject compendiums.

For my final paper in INFM 200: Informatics Fundamentals, I expand on the topic of Classification and Taxonomy further by exploring Schema.org: a collaborative project developed in 2011 by the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Yandex) to create a controlled vocabulary of attribute names as a framework for annotating webpage elements. To prepare for this paper, I completed a “Topic Proposal and Article Analysis” in which I discuss what led me to this topic and analyze several papers on Schema.org and modern digital classification on the internet.

In addition to the projects in INFM 200, I have also included a presentation prepared for INFM 206: Electronic Records Fundamentals in which I outline a data governance plan for Airbnb. Westra and Delaney cite design, development, and implementation as Informatics skills necessary to solve industry data and information management problems. My presentation, “Developing and Implementing a Data Management and Governance Plan for Airbnb” covers the process through which data and records are acquired, stored, protected, and utilized.

Evidence of Competency of PLO:

References

SJSU iSchool. (2018, October 31). Informatics careers: What it takes and how to get there. Medium. https://medium.com/sjsuischool/informatics-careers-what-it-takes-and-how-to-get-there-6f98a1795bc.

Westra, B. L., & Delaney, C. W. (2008, November 6). Informatics competencies for nursing and healthcare leaders. AMIA … Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2655955/.

Sousa, K. J., & Oz, E. (2015). Management information systems. Cengage Learning.