Independent Learning Exercises.

One of the most difficult skills to master (and I make no pretence to have mastered it myself) in web design is mapping a complex body of information in a consistent and comprehensible way. This is partially because, in general, this is an insoluble problem: there are usually an indefinite number of competing ways to categorise any given body of knowledge. There are a number of disciplines and techniques that have been developed to approach this problem (beside the informal mind-mapping approach that we use) which may repay a little further research. Use the following as the basis of a multi-term web search (also, restrict your search to educational domains such as .edu, .ac.uk, etc.):

• In database work, there is a technique of 'entity-relationship analysis' that is used to break down organisational information into orderly structures. You might find the basic ideas, and the diagramming techniques useful ... but don't get hung up on ideas such as 'normal forms'.
• In artificial intelligence, the linguistic discipline of semantics was put to use to create 'semantic networks': implementable structures that enabled bodies of knowledge to be broken down into atoms of meaning to be stored as databases for intelligent programs.
• In the world of libraries, encyclopedias and information retrieval there have been numerous schemes over the centuries for trying to map knowledge under orderly structures; the Dewey classification scheme used by the library is one example, the headings of Diderot's Encylopedie is another. People have even tried to invent 'perfect languages' in which all knowledge could be expressed in clear structures (Umberto Eco's book 'The Search for the Perfect Language' tells the history of these efforts).

At the very least, some research of this sort should make you realise how difficult the problem of mapping content potentially is, and you should always be alive to alternative ways of seeing and structuring the same body of knowledge.