Notes on Seth Earley’s Confab 2012 Workshop on Taxonomy, Metadata and Search: Put Your Content to Work:
- It’s okay to have more than one taxonomy.
- Taxonomy is NOT the same as navigation.
- You want to create multiple navigation structures from a taxonomy and prevent people from creating multiple taxonomies for navigational purposes.
- Taxonomies are the organising principles behind metadata and the values that populate metadata fields.
- Not all classifications are taxonomies.
- You need clear rules for when the business will own metadata vs when technology will own metadata.
- Use metadata to drive our content models.
- Always tag by id and never by term, so that you can change terms without impacting the taxonomy.
- Need to sell business value of taxonomy to business users.
- You cannot have a single standard for metadata that will cover all types of content for the Internet of Things. Embrace that and move on.
- You have to provide context to concepts to make them meaningful, which makes it difficult to beg, borrow and steal taxonomies from one business and apply it verbatim within your own.
- What seems like a taxonomy at first, may become a process.
- Information metabolism is about enabling the business to make information decisions faster. You need frameworks in place for improving an organisation’s information metabolism. Example given of Motorola going form 4 weeks to 24 hours.
- Understanding the different paces of change within your organisation clarifies a lot. You need adaptability in fast moving layers and stability in slow moving ones. Pace-Layering.
- You must pay attention to the clock speed of your process (e.g. web content (medium), e-commerce(very fast), intranet dev(slow))
- You need a universal remote control system for taxonomy. Each application has a remote for their system, a way to implement taxonomies, but there are not universal. They only pretend to be.
- Metaphor around moving house was valuable. So when migrating content, you need to touch it and see where it adds values, instead of just moving it.
- Every business case has ancillary benefits, that are harder to quantify. Stay focussed. Baseline, benchmark, and have a clear understanding of what value your intervention brings.
- Be clear on the relationship between maturity and capabilities, and where you as an organisation are on that journey. Then map your process requirements within the context of known capability gaps and seek to plug them and/or address them later. Use taxonomies in different ways depending upon your maturity.
- Always build capabilities on solid foundations. Invest in change management because whilst some folks gradually evolve with you, others have been forced into that change, so build capabilities with this in mind.
- Don’t ask data architects for taxonomies. Ask for reference data. That’s what you really want.
- When doing taxonomy, you must be thinking about search and SEO.
- Searchers search ambiguously. We need to help them disambiguate their queries by giving them values. Values derived from taxonomies.
- Beware what happens when you fix search, you find out that your content sucks.
An on-going challenge for CMS build projects is that they are pre-dominantly design led with the primary focus set on publishing content. With less attention paid to users in content producing roles, editorial needs are rarely catered. The new solution goes live and “The CMS” quickly becomes a dirty word because it has not been deployed to effectively create, understand and manage content. Sound familiar?
Content producers do a lot of things – Create content, Find content, Re-use content, Value content, Review content, Tag content. The CMS also pulls its weight with content: storing, indexing, auto tagging, displaying, recommending, publishing and workflow. This requires us to think really hard about how we intelligently structure content. And that’s where the battle is waged today for both time and effort to do editorial thinking on CMS build projects.
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The importance of digital content to an organisation is growing year on year. At all levels, we’re hearing people asking for better ways to manage their content. Not as fast as we hoped, but this has led to advances in the way content management projects are run. The reality is that the success of content management projects depends heavily upon a company’s digital and content maturity, and the degree to which they are amenable to organisational change within that project’s timeframe. As an expert, consultant and/or supplier brought in to help deliver a content management project, the chosen build path is somewhat pre-determined.
This post is the first in a series short posts that looks at some of the common build paths content management projects take when delivering web sites. Not every project is the same but they do tend to follow a set of common delivery patterns. Let’s start at the beginning with the simple site.
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So, after a couple of years of writing for other blogs, which I will continue to do in earnest here and here, I’m coming back home. No major changes. It will continue to be about the stuff I feel most passionate about: digital content, technology and productivity.
Why? Because I love writing. I’m not great at it and I’m okay with that. But it’s the most effective way for me to structure and prioritise my ideas. Seriously people, I have far too many of the buggers. Also, writing keeps you honest and engaged with others. If you think you know something,write about it. Writing is a surefire way of finding those pesky gaps in your knowledge that others, often very much smarter than you are, will help you plug.
Looking forward to 2012.
A Web Standard is both a guide and a measure. I believe that Web Teams that invest enough time and the enough effort into Web Standards, will reap the benefits. We covered this in a previous post. Today, we dive straight in with a concrete example: URL Naming Web Standard. Note, just to keep this post to a reasonable length, I’ve had to trim it down. Rest assured it does have enough meat in there to illustrate what is a Web Standard.
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Not many web sites today are launched with clearly defined and/or enforceable Web Standards. For larger organisations, looking to execute efficiently on the Web, this is a major stumbling block.
Confession. Having worked in and for large organisations for over 25 years, I was never a Web Standards fan boy. They were always out-of-date. They were written by non-practitioners. Their format was dry and verbose. Their purpose unclear but just obey. Effecting change or providing feedback was actively discouraged. In short, information flowed one way: down! There was not much to like about Web Standards.
However, if you can get past all, there were little gems of insight locked away in these Web Standards. Looking back through older eyes I realise that I never really hated Web Standards. I just didn’t like the way they were enforced. So I rejected them and promptly falling foul of throwing the baby out with the bath water.
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