Users of an information system have an information need. It's the information architect's work to help these users "to complete tasks and find information in blissful ignorance of [their] labours" (Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld).

Information needs to be organized to be helpful to the users of a system. And there is even more to it:

This is very important: Since we work in teams of software developers, we need to get used to the fact that communication and organizing information help us to understand our domains better. Finally we yield better results: happier users, happier stakeholders, and happier teams.

How can information architects help users to find without searching? How can team collaboration on information help to understand the domain more thoroughly?

To answer this questions we will take a theoretical and a practical approach.

• In this article we examine the types of searching and ways to organize information. This is the basis for our practical considerations.
• In the next article we will provide a more practical approach on how to apply this theory on a Confluence wiki using projectdoc. We look from the perspective of software development teams to create their project documentation collaboratively.

The goal is to learn how to organize project information effectively. While we aim at software developers with the need to document their projects, software and system architecture, this article is probably also relevant for other teams that work on other kinds of projects collaboratively.

On classifying information we also relate them. With each relation we enlarge our web of information, enabling users to travel from one topic to another related information.

When we define an organization structure we often use the top-down approach. We arrange the information hierarchically and speak of taxonomies.

In the sense of Aristotle's Definition of Definition this process of classification makes us understand the terms of our domains. To define a term we first have to put it in a broader context, that is: put it to the class it belongs to.Then specify what distinguishes it from all other elements in this class. In the context of a taxonomy the upstream terms are generalizations, the downstream terms specializations.

Labelling information is a bottom-up approach for organizing. Every resource of type 'Podcast' has something in common. Every topic labelled with 'Java', too. Although these classifications are rather generic to be useful by themselves, they help to specify quite specific queries as in "List every resource of type 'Podcast' labelled with 'Java'".

Once the information is classified, it can be applied to enable browsing. Use automation to render links to relevant information on search criteria. In Finding without Searching - applied! we will have a look on how Confluence and projectdoc supports us on this task.