11 - Powering Structured Content with Taxonomies

Summary

Editor's note: Structured content is an exciting evolution of digital publishing that promises both efficiency and opportunity for organisations that are willing to upend their traditional content production processes. Tagging and taxonomies are key components – otherwise, how does the system know what something is and where it should go? Rahel has evangelised the structured content approach for years and we have worked together on projects for clients who are interested in reaping the benefits.

Introduction

When it comes to content, the statement by Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, is the most appropriate: the only constant in life is change.

Content goes back beyond even hieroglyphics to scratchings on cave walls. During the course of my own career, content went from analogue and output to print, to digital and output to interfaces; from book-based content to topic-based content to molecular content (for an elaboration of the rise of molecular content and its place in product content, see https://storyneedle. com/molecular-content-and-the-separation-of-concerns); from keywords to metadata back to keywords as metadata; from information architecture to taxonomies and now information architecture and taxonomies; and from taxonomies to knowledge graphs. Every few years would see a change in how content needed to be formed and structured.

In the early days, this meant a change in writing style to enforce consistency across a corpus of mix-and-match content. Then, it became a change in form in addition to writing style, going from chapters and sections to topic-based content that was used for in-software help or aggregated into a longer form, such as a manual. The next change was to add topic keywords and, shortly after that, breaking content into smaller units that could be modelled. With many of the changes came new processes and new production software – and often collaboration with new professions.

The pace at which content production processes change is increasing and we may soon be on the cusp of not having to structure content for it to be reliably understood by search technologies – note the emphasis on reliably. It may feel like structured content has been around for a long time, but industry has a long time to go yet until we reach the threshold where structured content is more common than not.