In taxonomy for information management or web publishing, you are limited by the shape of the content. However granular your terms, most CMSs can only apply them to whole documents or pages. Some organizations have more complex content management needs. Regulated industries need legal approval for individual paragraphs. Technology or manufacturing companies with complex product families must filter and display only the relevant information.
Structured content technologies meet these needs by managing and recombining smaller chunks of content, typically stored as XML. Metadata is embedded in the content itself — from the whole document or page to blocks within a page, and even individual terms in a sentence. While these technologies are mature, the approach to metadata often lacks discipline and co-ordination. Systematic taxonomy development and integration can greatly benefit user experience and content management.
This talk shows how taxonomies can be applied effectively to structured content authoring and delivery environments. An end-to-end use case will be demonstrated, including templated XML authoring, smart page-level and inline tagging, and personalized delivery to end users, tying together content from different teams in an organization. The audience will learn how the business benefits of taxonomy can be multiplied when applied to granular, structured content.
Joe Pairman is Lead Consultant at Mekon Ltd., helping clients realize the full potential of structured content and taxonomy. Before joining Mekon, he led the implementation of a DITA XML-based component content management system at HTC, driving development of the information model, solving numerous publishing and localization challenges, and designing the support content architecture for HTC’s help app and responsive website. Joe combines expert judgment of technical approaches with a primary focus on the human users and collaborative interactions that underlie any successful information management project involving technology.
