Information as architecture, architecture as information

Brian Sletten explores the intersection of design, architecture, and development, with the Web's resource-oriented abstractions serving as both information and architecture. Brian explains how this ties into the Web's organization, its software, the people using it, its requirements, and its security.

The Web builds upon the Internet, enabling a level of innovation that is unprecedented in terms of its achievability and achievement. Anyone from garage-based startups to Fortune 500 companies can find incentives and success while adding value to the network of interlinked documents, apps, and information, and arbitrary stakeholders are able to exchange information without precoordination because of the use of standards. However, the original goal was not necessarily to build the public Web. It was to solve the information-sharing problem in scalable, evolvable ways within organizations. Standards make this feasible, but the vision makes it possible. We have a resource-oriented abstraction that interwingles and unifies data, documents, concepts, and services into an architecture that works. Resources are information, and resources are part of the architecture. Therefore, architecture is part of the information space. While there have always been attempts to model and describe the architectures we use, we have never had tools that worked at the right level of abstraction until now. How systems are built are evermore tied into who is building them, how they are being built, and how they align with their overall strategic and business goals. Brian Sletten explores the intersection of design, architecture, and development, with the Web’s resource-oriented abstractions serving as both information and architecture. Brian explains how this ties into the Web’s organization, its software, the people using it, its requirements, and its security.