Creating Context through Content Structure and Semantics

Imagine searching for a product manual on a company's website only to find a mess of documents. You spend several minutes trying to locate the right information, eventually giving up in frustration. Poorly structured content wastes time, diminishes user experience, and weakens customer trust.

Content is the key to great customer experiences. To give customers the best experience, it requires the ability to mix and match different content pieces– to create content components once and reuse them in various ways.

This process requires structured content with intelligence shaped by semantics and metadata. By structuring and contextualizing content, we can transform frustrating user experiences into seamless, personalized interactions.

The Importance of Structured Content

Organizing content using a clear framework, like the Core Content Model® (CCM), offers several benefits. It makes your content:

  1. Scalable
  2. Reusable
  3. Adaptable
  4. Measurable

Real-time, personalized conversations at scale require structured, intelligent, semantically rich, and accessible content.

This article looks at how organizing content can make things smoother for both writers and readers. We'll focus on two main ideas:

  1. Content structure: How information is arranged
  2. Content semantics: The meaning behind the information


We'll explore how structure and semantics work together throughout the content lifecycle.

Structure and Semantics in Content

Structure shapes content with an object-oriented approach:

  • Content is organized as reusable content objects rather than hard-coded, unstructured blobs. These building blocks form the basis of dynamic content delivery.
  • Objects have containers that can be manipulated, transformed, annotated, reused, and managed from a central location. These containers can be pointed to from anywhere, enabling efficient content management and scalability.

Content semantics contextualize content structures:

  • Content semantics define the entities, associations, and relationships for a piece of content within the metadata. This contextualization enhances the content's relevance and findability.
  • Semantics enable machines to understand content connections and relationships, facilitating automated personalization and intelligent content delivery.

 

Watch the full content engineering roundtable here to learn about structure and semantics
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Content and Semantic Models

Content and semantic models work together to create intelligent, adaptable content:
 
  1. Content Model: This organizes the structure of information. It ensures that content is arranged in a way that supports business goals and makes it easy to manage throughout its lifecycle.
  2. Semantic Model: This refers to the meaning of content. It uses taxonomies and ontologies to create a framework for understanding content and applying metadata across different systems.

At [A], we use the following three types of models for semantics:

Taxonomy: A classification scheme that organizes content and assets into hierarchical relationships, optimizing them for internal and external searches.
Thesaurus: A rubric defining and relating terms, supporting content semantics.
Ontology: A formal, machine-interpretable domain model enabling automated reasoning about data.

With added intelligence, we apply more rules and properties to content objects, enabling proper machine interpretation and supporting various stages of the content lifecycle.

A Core Semantic Model defines concepts, their relationships, and the terminology for identifying concepts across domains and systems. This model informs the Core Metadata Model, incorporated into the Core Content Model® (CCM).

As consumer needs change and new ways to deliver content emerge, content intelligence must evolve. To prepare for both current and future interactive channels, we need to create smart content.

Implementing a Core Content Model® (CCM)

The Core Content Model® (CCM) is a framework designed to help businesses create, manage, and use content more effectively across their entire organization.

At its core, the CCM optimizes the entire content lifecycle, from planning and authoring to managing and publishing. It focuses on content structure while also accommodating semantics through contextualized metadata. This approach allows businesses to maintain flexibility, as the CCM remains software- and vendor-agnostic, connecting various content creation methods to diverse consumer usage patterns.

Key features of the CCM include:
 
  • Scalability to adapt to different content needs
  • Ability to personalize content for different users
  • Reduction of friction in content processes

This model injects static content with enough technical intelligence to make it dynamic and interactive, simplifying the development of content tools, applications, and APIs.

In essence, the Core Content Model® transforms how businesses approach content, making it a more powerful tool for achieving their goals and meeting customer needs in our increasingly digital world.

Content Structure Through DITA

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), is the most common solution for structuring technical documentation. DITA solves problems of content reuse, interoperability, and omnichannel publishing.

DITA provides the baseline XML representation for the Core Content Model® (CCM), reducing the required transformations. As a component-based system, DITA is managed effectively with a Component Content Management System (CCMS). Unlike traditional Content Management Systems (CMS) that work at the document level, a CCMS facilitates content reuse at the component level, increasing content flow across systems and solutions.

Enterprises, especially departments creating technical documentation, benefit from DITA because it supports:
 
  • Open standards
  • Topic-based orientation
  • Core structures
  • Efficient reuse mechanisms
  • Specialization

Content Structure Through DITA

The Role of Metadata

Metadata connects structure and meaning in content. It adds important information to our content's framework, helping both content management and understanding.

Semantics connect to content via metadata, producing different presentations or behaviors for the same content asset. Metadata indicates what can happen to a piece of content after an applied action or usage.

Metadata resources:

  • Relate to external systems that control the source data.
  • They are helpful for downstream processes.
  • They are reusable across content sets, systems, and downstream processes.


The Core Metadata Model (CMM) encompasses connectors between structure and semantics, such as:
 

  • CMS Metadata
  • Markup
  • Knowledge Graphs
  • JSON-LD
  • RDF
The Role of Metadata
 

Content Value through Structure, Semantics, and Metadata

Structured content, enhanced with semantics and metadata, empowers your digital assets to reduce costs and deliver relevant interactions to the right audience at the right time.

At [A], we recognize that effective content structure is the backbone of successful customer engagement. We enable seamless content movement and contextualization by representing content in formats like XML and aligning structure across systems. This approach allows for advanced experiences like automated personalization, ensuring your content remains relevant and dynamic.


Semantics and Metadata

How [A] Can Transform Your Content

Expertise in Structure and Semantics:
 
  • We specialize in organizing content into reusable components, enabling efficient management and scalability.
  • Our expertise in semantics ensures that content is contextually rich, making it more discoverable and meaningful.

Support Across the Content Lifecycle:
 
  • From planning and authoring to managing and publishing, we provide end-to-end support for your content initiatives.
  • Our professional services and product teams are skilled in supporting both new and existing projects, ensuring lasting impact.

Why Choose [A]?

 
  • Personalization: Create dynamic, personalized customer interactions with intelligent content that flows across systems and processes.
  • Scalability: Develop a content strategy that grows with your business, supported by structured content and rich semantics.
  • Efficiency: Reduce costs and enhance content throughput with our content structure and metadata expertise.

Contact us today to learn how [A] can help you build an intelligent content program that aligns with your business goals and enhances customer engagement.
 

 


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Authorship

Maxwell Hoffmann is a Content Author, Editor, Contributor and a Marketing Team Member at [A]. He has authored hundreds of blogs and created hundreds of product feature videos. His expertise runs deep with TechComm writers, including FrameMaker and most DITA authoring solutions. He is well known throughout the content strategy community due to many conference presentations and workshops.
 

[A] Editor's Note:  This article was originally published in ISTC Communicator in August 2019.