Linking Information Through Function

How information resources can be meaningfully related has been addressed in contexts from bibliographic entries to hyperlinks and, more recently, linked data. The genre structure and relationships among genre structure constituents shed new light on organizing information by purpose or function. This study examines the relationships among a set of functional units previously constructed in a taxonomy, each of which is a chunk of information embedded in a document and is distinct in terms of its communicative function. Through a card-sort study, relationships among functional units were identified with regard to their occurrence and function. The findings suggest that a group of functional units can be identified, collocated, and navigated by particular relationships. Understanding how functional units are related to each other is significant in linking information pieces in documents to support finding, aggregating, and navigating information in a distributed information environment.