SPFE Documentation | Collections > Essays on SPFE > Bottom-up Information Architecture

Bottom-up Information Architecture

By Mark Baker

Summary

A bottom-up information architecture is one which designed for the reader who enters a content set at an individual page, often unaware of the larger information set, its structure, or its scope.

A bottom up architecture is characterized by:

Topics or pages are written on the Every Page is Page One principle: Each page is a potential landing page and starting point for the user, and there is no one preferred path through the content set.
Topics or pages are added to the collection individually, without the need to place them in a top-down structure or table of contents. New pages are integrated automatically into the collection based on their metadata. Collections are formed by queries and all topics that meet the conditions of the query are included automatically.
Topics or pages work as hubs of their local semantic space, linking to topics on related subjects.