LATCH
Richard Saul Wurman's Five Hatracks
Location
Location is chosen when the information who you are comparing comes from several different sources or locales. Doctors use different locations of the body to group and study medicine. Concerning an industry you might want to know where on the world goods are distributed.
Alphabet
Alphabet is best used when you have enormous amount of data. For example words in a dictionary or names in a telephone. As usually everybody is familiar with the Alphabet, categorizing by Alphabet is recommendable when not all the audience is familiar with different kind of groupings or categories you could use instead.
Time
Time is the best form of categorization for events that happen over fixed durations. Meeting schedules or our calendar are examples. The work of important persons might be displayed as timeline as well. Time is an easily framework in which changes can be observed and comparisons made.
Category
Category is an organization type often used for goods and industries. Shops and services in the yellow pages are easy to find by category. Retail stores are divided into e.g. men- and woman-clothing. This mode works well to organizing items of similar importance.
Hierarchy
Hierarchy organizes by magnitude. From small to large, least expensive to most expensive, by order of importance, etc. Hierarchy is to be used if you want to assign weight or value to the ordered information
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
– Albert Einstein
Read more
Richard Wurman explains how information architects can open themselves up to understanding, learning, and ultimately being able to explain information to others.
The Business of Understanding - p.6
By Richard S Wurman
Dec 28, 2000
Article on informIT is provided courtesy of Que