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Web Information Architecture

Rationale

In this paragraph the work carried out for the design of the web information architecture for the Agriculture Unit of the JRC will be presented. This unit and ETF share the overall scope: dissemination of best practices, sharing knowledge and contribute to policy development in a well defined scope. While ETF is committed with training issues, the unit presented deals with agriculture issues. Similarities are the following:

  • Similar stakeholders (policy makers, sectors specialists, experts and researchers)
  • Dissemination of information on projects carried out by the unit
  • The unit itself has to manage the contents
  • Dissemination also outside of Europe

Background

The customer was the Agriculture Unit of the JRC. The Agriculture Unit provide scientific and technical support on EU Agriculture and Food Security policies. In Europe, the Unit addresses key issues related to the management and control of the Common Agriculture Policy. In developing countries, assistance is given to the EU Food Security Thematic Program with special emphasis on Africa, and to providing building blocks for an European capacity for Global Agriculture Monitoring.

Challenge

The unit addresses several issues in EU agriculture policy making. Primary goal of the website is to disseminate information about agriculture themes among stakeholders (policy makers, sector specialists researchers and general public): by doing so, the site plays an important role in bridging the gap between research and policy making. To achieve, its goal the site has to provide updated information regarding a number of issues (from latest news on agriculture policies, to most recent researches in the field) and it has to be easy to use (i.e. easy to insert, update and retrieve information) for a non-ICT expert. users had difficulties in finding materials because contents was not well organized and many different type of information were published. Challenge was to design a novel and innovative organization to the information in order to allow users to find every piece of information in three steps.

Process

First action carried out, in order to have a clear vision on issues and how to fix them was a deep analysis and a study on the “As is” and “To be” scenarios (Figure 1).
On the basis of the scenarios, the information was fully re-structured:

  • A new information structure was introduced and clearly presented both in logical and structural way (Figure 2 and Figure 3)
  • A new approach to information management: the old hierarchical classification was replaced by the facet classification (Figure 4)
  • Finally, metadata were introduced in the search interface as a refinement option for the user

Results

The result was a great improvement in search performances. Information are more easy to find, also for non expert users. A new user-friendly search tool was introduced : the easiness of use hide to the user the complex algorithms that are behind the tool (Figure 5).

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Attività

Screenshoots

Figure 1 - “As is” and “To be” scenarios

Figure 2 - Logical view of the new information structure

Figure 3 - Part of the structural view of the information structure

Figure 4 - Hierarchical classification vs facet classification

Figure 5 - The new search tool based on facet classification

 

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