The deliverables of information architects (IA) are sitemaps and wireframes. Those deliverables can be compared with the floormaps and foto-realistic images produced by an building architect. Additional information about the deliverables of the IA is often only available in long (boring) documents.

The time-consuming process of textual describing dynamic frontends, particularly those using web 2.0 technologies, ensures strongly increasing costs but doesn't ensure an understandability of the specification by the customer and/or the developers.

This is one of the reasons modeling has been exchanged by agile development. However using the agile approach increases the risk to lose the global overview. There is also a risk that the focus shifts from the functionality to the graphical design. Another disadvantage of the current approach is that it doesn't support separation of concerns very well, which causes that todays IA's fulfill several roles.

The Univeral information architecture Modeling Language, invented by Alex Jongman, is a symbolic modeling language like UML. UiaML is not an extension of UML but can be combined with it.

Our goal is it to make UiaML a powerful communication tool for IA's. So powerful that it can be compared to the blueprints used within the construction sector. And that sitemaps and wireframes are derived from the UiaML model as foto-realistic images and floormaps of a construction are derived from the blueprint.

UiaML will also support a role based modeling process, which for instance enable an IA to separate graphical design and semantic design and enables managers to add/get management information into the model.

Currently we believe that the UiaML core is quite stable and very useful. The howto section provides information on how to use the UiaML core (we will add howto's in the weeks to come), while the reference guide offers specification information about each core symbol.

The UiaML plugins will aren't finished yet, but their specification will be added in the future.

Another future goal is the development of an UiaML case tool.

We hope to find some support in the community that will help us to reach these goals. Feel free to contact us.

With regards,

Alex