Toward a document‐centered ontological theory for information architecture in corporations

The beginning of the 21st century attested to the first movements toward information architecture (IA), originating from the field of library and information science (LIS). IA is acknowledged as an important meta‐discipline concerned with the design, implementation, and maintenance of digital information spaces. Despite the relevance of IA, there is little research about the subject within LIS, and still less if one considers initiatives for creating a theory for IA. In this article, we provide a theory for IA and describe the resources needed to create it through ontological models. We also choose the “document” as the key entity for such theory, contemplating kinds of documents that not only serve to register information, but also create claims and obligations in society. To achieve our goals, we provide a background for subtheories from LIS and from Applied Ontology. As a result, we present some basic theory for IA in the form of a formal framework to represent corporations in which IA activities take place, acknowledging that our approach is de facto a subset of IA we call the enterprise information architecture (EAI) approach. By doing this, we highlight the effects that documents cause within corporations in the scope of EIA.