AINTscience revealed:

How to organize the docu­ments of small businesses - and find them again!

By Kjell Øystein Arisland

What AINTscience is

AINTscience is a well defined set of concepts, rules and guidelines that are easy to learn and understand, and a set of mnemonics (memory aids) to help you remember and use the rules.

What AINTscience is for

AINTscience is for organizing your files and file directories (catalogs) on the company file server, on your laptop, and any place where a personal business or small company keeps files.

Who AINTscience is for

AINTscience is designed for small businesses. Larger companies and organizations will usually have more complex needs and can probably gain from specially designed information architectures, and possibly corporate taxonomies.

Why the business world needs AINTscience

Systems of files and file directories easily become unstructured and messy, making it hard to find files when needed, and time-consuming to figure out where to place new files. This is detrimental to cooperation between employees, it is confounding, common and costly. Happily, with AINTscience it is cost-effectively correctable and avoidable.

How AINTscience is available

AINTscience can be downloaded as three documents in pdf-format. They are

1. The "Quick start guide", a short and incomplete introduction, and
2. The "User guide", written as an easily readable textbook, and
3. The "Reference manual", containing everything about AINTscience in a form suitable for reference when needed, but also sequentially readable for the more technically minded.

The AINTscience user guide has numerous illustrations, and a total of 62 pages in A4 format. The Quick start guide is an excerpt from the first part of the User guide, mainly from Chapter 2. Every user of AINTscience should be familiar with at least the Quick start guide.

The rest of the user guide is required reading for AINTscience administrators, but is non-technically oriented, aimed at the average non-techie.

The Quick start guide and the User guide are available free of charge for personal and single individual business use.

The AINTscience reference manual has 56 pages, also in A4 format, and is a tool for looking up details and understanding why AINTscience is designed the way it is. It is a complete reference to all the details.

Together, these two documents contain a thorough description of what AINTscience is, how to implement it, use it, and why and how it works. They are written for easy reading with many examples and motivating explanations.

AINTscience is simple, inexpensive and useful

AINTscience is based on a set of simple rules, and four classes of concepts. The classes are color-coded (hence the flag) throughout both documents, and a set of mnemonics supported by very memorable concepts make the classes easy to understand and remember.

AINTscience requires no special software or hardware, and can be used on any regular file server. It is simple and inexpensive, and quite possibly one of the most useful tools available for organizing electronic documents in small businesses.

Get AINTscience in pdf form here