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Category: Technical Concepts

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What is it?

An enhanced view of a real-world environment, using technology to supplement a normal view with additional content that enhances the experience.

Why is it important?

Augmented reality (AR) is growing rapidly and is used in many fields, including publishing, translation, and education. Content strategy for augmented reality is critical for displaying the right content in the right place at the right time.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

Augmented reality (AR) is becoming a common delivery mechanism for content. AR displays information about the environment as an overlay to an ordinary experience. Reality can be augmented on a variety of devices, including computers, eyeglasses such as Google Glass, and handheld devices such as mobile phones and tablets. Examples of AR apps for mobile devices include Blippar, Wikitude, and Layar.

Augmented reality is growing rapidly. In 2014, over 864 million cell phones will be AR enabled. By 2020, 103 million automobiles will contain AR technology. By the end of 2016, AR is expected to bring in as much as $600 billion USD in revenue. Augmented reality is influencing fields such as publishing, translation, task support, repair, workplace, accessibility, medical, military, navigation, sports, automotive, architecture, construction, education, games, art, shopping, and tourism.

In publishing, AR is making an impact by enhancing and even replacing publications. AR is increasingly used in newspapers in North America, Europe, and Asia, including Los Angeles Times, Le Figaro, and The Times of India. IKEA’s 2014 catalog lets users preview furniture in their room before buying. And Audi announced that the owner’s manual for its 2015 A3 model will be replaced with an augmented reality app that runs on mobile devices.

Content strategists must plan for AR implementations and understand how to integrate content in AR apps. Considerations include providing content that is tagged with appropriate metadata, easily refreshed, device-independent, and provided on demand in the correct format.

About Marta Rauch

Photo of Marta Rauch

Term:

Augmented Reality

Marta Rauch is a senior principal information developer at Oracle for mobile and cloud projects. A Google Glass Explorer, she is interested in enterprise use cases for augmented reality. Marta holds a BA from Stanford University and a certificate from the University of California in Managing the Development of Technical Communication.

Term:

Website: martarauch.wordpress.com

Twitter: @martarauch

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/profile/view?id=11958425

Facebook: facebook.com/marta.rauch

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What is it?

Structurally-rich and semantically-categorized content that is, therefore, automatically discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable, and adaptable.

Why is it important?

Enables organizations to rapidly adapt their content to the changing needs of their customers and the devices they use.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

Too often, content is handcrafted to get the “message right” in a single output instead of getting the correct content to the right customer in the right context and on the device of their choosing. We have to move away from the artisanal creation of content to a manufacturing model in which consistently structured, reusable content components can be assembled into a variety of content deliverables. That requires intelligent content.

Intelligent content is supported by content models, a reuse strategy, and a taxonomy strategy.

Content models define the structure of content components and content assemblies. They are formalized in templates, forms, and markup languages like XML. Structured content is format-free, style-less content that can be automatically displayed, filtered, or layered to optimize display on a target device with little or no human intervention. It reduces costs and increases speed of delivery. Structured writing guidelines guide authors in writing consistently structured content.

A reuse strategy identifies what types of content will be reused, the level of granularity (component size), how the content will be reused, and how to automatically assemble reusable content. With modular, reusable content, you can change the order of components, include or exclude components, and reuse components to build entirely new types of content to meet new needs.

A taxonomy strategy defines how to store and retrieve your content based on a common vocabulary (metadata). Using metadata, you can retrieve the pieces of content you need to automatically build customized information sets.

About Ann Rockley

Photo of Ann Rockley

Ann Rockley is CEO of The Rockley Group. She is a pioneer in content reuse, intelligent content strategies for multi-channel delivery, and content management best practices. Known as the “mother” of content strategy, she introduced the concept with her best-selling book, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy (Peachpit, 2012).

Term:

Email: mailto:rockley@rockley.com

Website: rockley.com

Twitter: @arockley

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/annrockleytrg

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What is it?

The one-time movement of content from one repository to another.

Why is it important?

Usually as the result of a publishing platform switch, a content migration is necessary to continue working with and publishing existing content on a new platform.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

When organizations change content management systems, the content in old systems must be moved into new systems. In the simplest scenario, this is a direct transfer from one repository to another. However, this “simple” operation usually opens up complicated questions about what content is moving, how the content must change, and how it will support the same level of functionality in the new system.

Content migrations are preceded by a comprehensive content inventory and an editorial process to determine which content can be discarded and which must be migrated.

Most migrations also have a development component, where technical decisions must be made on how content will function in a new environment—for example, how properties map from one system to another, how links are maintained, and how navigation is preserved.

In particular, migrating content that is interlinked to other content, either through explicit links or spatial positioning, can be difficult because the content, its relationships, and its position in the larger content structure must be preserved. This is complicated by the common reality that the two systems might have fundamentally different paradigms of content organization.

A content migration project invariably culminates in a “content freeze,” where no changes can be made to content in the old system until it has been quality checked and launched in its new environment.

The time and budget required for content migrations are often either completely overlooked or underestimated. Managing a migration process is a complex combination of technical, organizational, schedule, budget, and human processes.

About Deane Barker

Photo of Deane Barker

Deane Barker is a founding partner in Blend Interactive, a content management consultancy in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Deane has spent more than a decade speaking on and writing about web content management systems, methodologies, and practices.

Term:

Email: mailto:deane@blendinteractive.com

Website: gadgetopia.com

Twitter: @gadgetopia

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/deane

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What is it?

Content that is designed to adapt to the needs of the customer, not just cosmetically, but also in substance and in capability. Adaptive content automatically responds to the screen size and orientation of any device, but goes further by displaying relevant content that takes full advantage of the specific capabilities of the device being used.

Why is it important?

Enables content professionals to deliver the best information experience possible in the most efficient and effective way.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

Adaptive content automatically adjusts to different environments and device capabilities to deliver the best possible customer experience. It can be customized on-the-fly, displayed in any order, made to respond to specific customer interactions, changed based on location, and integrated with content from other sources. Adaptive content takes advantage of the features of the device being used in order to meet the needs of individual customers.

Not only can we display information based on screen size and orientation (the basis of responsive design), but with adaptive content we can:

  • Leverage location-awareness to determine where users are and deliver locale-specific content

  • Determine wireless internet connection speed (hot spots versus mobile cellular, for example) and deliver content that’s optimized to the available bandwidth

  • Discover whether a device is in motion or not (and at what speed and direction), providing us with sufficient evidence to deduce whether a user is traveling by automobile or by plane, so we can provide content of value for that user’s travel situation

  • Deliver content in the right language (the language of the user’s choosing)

In today’s mobile, global world, our content must be able to adapt so that it reaches the right person at the right time in the right language and format. And, it must be able to be intelligent enough to use the capabilities of the device to the best effect.

About Charles Cooper

Photo of Charles Cooper

Charles Cooper has been involved in creating and testing digital content for more than 20 years. He’s passionate about user experience, taxonomy, workflow design, composition, digital publishing, and mobile delivery. Charles teaches, facilitates modeling sessions, and develops taxonomy and workflow strategies. He loves to figure out challenging delivery issues.

Term:

Email: mailto:cooper@rockley.com

Website: rockley.com

Twitter: @Cooper_42

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/charlescoopertrg

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What is it?

A software application that supports information capture, editorial, governance, and publishing processes with tools such as workflow, access control, versioning, search, and collaboration.

Why is it important?

Without the automation that a content management system (CMS) provides, and the potential for integration into other software systems, many content-related tasks must be completed manually, greatly decreasing reliability and efficiency.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

A content management system (CMS) is important because it provides a hub for multiple users and systems to interact with content. The CMS gives a content author the tools needed to support multi-channel delivery, adaptive or semantic content, and more.

There are thousands of CMS options on the market, most of which fall into a few main categories such as Web CMS, Component CMS, and Enterprise CMS. The usability of different systems, when applied to different delivery contexts, varies greatly.

The differences between the types of specialized content management systems, as well as the different specific vendor options, are often not clear to many in the organization, leaving the responsibility to the content strategist to bridge the gap. IT departments may understand some of the technicalities, but the full impact on the content and users will often not be clear to them.

Content strategists must understand basic CMS principles and capabilities so that the organization’s business goals drive and shape the content process. The ability to explain CMS-specific requirements can help ensure the correct system is selected or make the case for a replacement system when needed.

If change is not feasible, content strategists need to articulate a realistic set of customization and configuration requirements to the technical integration team so that content processes are properly supported.

About Noz Urbina

Photo of Noz Urbina

Noz Urbina is an internationally recognized content strategist and co-author of Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brand, and benefits. He specializes in consulting and training in cutting-edge, multi-channel, business-driven projects. Since 2000, he has provided services to Fortune 500 organizations and small-to-medium enterprises.

Term:

Email: mailto:b.noz.urbina@gmail.com

Website: lessworkmoreflow.blogspot.com

Twitter: @nozurbina

LinkedIn:

Facebook: facebook.com/noz.urbina.3

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What is it?

A methodology for specifying, designing, and deploying the digital documents needed to automate business processes and web services.

Why is it important?

Using a systematic approach to modeling documents and the processes that use them ensures that documents make sense for the people and applications that use them. A systematic approach also makes documents more robust and adaptable when technology or business conditions change.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

Document engineering systematizes and synthesizes concepts and skills from information and process analysis, electronic publishing, business informatics, and web architecture. Content strategists may already be familiar with some of these disciplines, but document engineering brings them together into a focused, document-centric methodology.

Document engineering builds on the simple ideas that documents formalize the interactions between businesses and their customers or partners, and that the exchange of documents between these parties follows common patterns. Supply chains, web-based stores and marketplaces, government services, auctions, and numerous other types of network-enabled business and services models are examples.

Document engineering bridges seemingly incompatible approaches to designing and deploying document models. Narrative or publication document types have generally been designed using qualitative or even informal methods. Such design methods make narrative documents seem very different from transactional document types, which are generally designed using formal methods such as those of relational database theory in order to optimize them for automated applications.

Document engineering proposes that analyzing and understanding narrative and transactional document models involves reaching the same goals with different techniques: identifying content components, refining them to ensure that they are sound, organizing for reuse, and creating new document models from the collection of reusable content parts.

This enables document engineering to be applied to the entire range of document types, which is essential because most document-intensive processes involve a mixture of narrative and transactional types—think of filing personal income taxes, where you go back and forth between the instructions and the tax forms. In this light, document engineering is a natural consequence of audience analysis and user experience.

About Robert J. Glushko

Photo of Robert J. Glushko

Robert J. Glushko is an Adjunct Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He has three decades of research and development, consulting, and entrepreneurial experience in information systems and service design, electronic publishing, and Internet commerce. He founded or co-founded four companies, including Veo Systems (1997), which pioneered Extensible Markup Language (XML) in electronic business.

Term:

Email: mailto:glushko@berkeley.edu

Website: people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~glushko/

Twitter: @rjglushko

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/pub/bob-glushko/0/14/a66

Facebook: facebook.com/bob.glushko

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What is it?

The application of engineering discipline to the design, acquisition, management, delivery, and use of content and the technologies deployed to support the full content lifecycle.

Why is it important?

Ensures that improvement investments achieve the greatest benefits by introducing rigorous discipline to the design of content and associated technical and business processes.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

Engineering applies scientific principles to the design, development, support, and use of systems that are themselves made up of structures and processes. The challenge of engineering is to design systems that balance and integrate a variety of considerations including usability, sustainability, affordability, manufacturability, efficiency, and effectiveness. To overcome this challenge, engineering approaches these objectives with a methodical use of precedents, standards, frameworks, measurement, testing, and state-of-the-art technologies.

It has become increasingly obvious that, in the 21st century, the business of content cannot continue to operate as a cottage industry. However well-intentioned they may be, professionals working in isolation and leveraging their preferred desktop tools and personalized techniques simply cannot keep up with the demands of a rapidly evolving, and increasingly digital, global economy.

Content engineering seeks to bring the business of content into the modern era by ensuring that content structures, tools, and processes are designed in a way that will make the most of current best practices, proven content technologies, applicable design patterns, and existing implementation experience.

Simply put, the discipline of content engineering represents the context within which content strategists, and indeed everyone involved in the content lifecycle, will operate from now on.

Author Information:

Name:

Joe Gollner

Bio:

Joe Gollner is Managing Director of Gnostyx Research, an independent consultancy and integrator specializing in applied content technologies. He has been active in the content management industry for over 20 years and has led numerous large-scale implementations where open standards were leveraged to integrate complex enterprise content processes.

Email:

jag@gnostyx.com

Website:

http://www.gnostyx.com

Twitter:

@joegollner

LinkedIn:

http://ca.linkedin.com/in/jgollner/

Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/joegollner

Phone:

1-613-670-5786

Address:

1 Rideau Street, Suite 700 Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1N 8S7

About Joe Gollner

Photo of Joe Gollner

Joe Gollner is Managing Director of Gnostyx Research, an independent consultancy and integrator specializing in applied content technologies. He has been active in the content management industry for over 20 years and has led numerous large-scale implementations where open standards were leveraged to integrate complex enterprise content processes.

Term:

Email: mailto:jag@gnostyx.com

Website: gnostyx.com

Twitter: @joegollner

LinkedIn: ca.linkedin.com/in/jgollner/

Facebook: facebook.com/joegollner

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What is it?

The inclusion of content from one source into another source by hyperlink reference. The presented result appears as though the included content had occurred at the point of reference.

Why is it important?

First formalized as the idea of link-based, use-by reference, transclusion is a fundamental feature for any document representation system that enables true use-by-reference.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

Transclusion was coined by hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson as an attempt to define and codify the concept that we now accept as hypertext. It has only been with technologies such as Structured Generalized Markup Language (SGML), Extensible Markup Language (XML), and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) that it has become possible to implement transclusion.

Content used to be reused through the problematic copy-and-paste method. Transclusion allows content to be reused far more efficiently by the more sophisticated method of including a hyperlink that refers to the content to be placed there. In the information management sense, transclusion makes content easy to track, removes redundant information, eliminates errors, and so on.

Use-by-reference serves the creators and managers of content by allowing a single instance to be used in multiple places and by maintaining an explicit link between the reused content and all of the places it is used, which supports better tracking and management. These two aspects of use-by-reference—transparency to readers and manageability—are embodied in the term transclusion.

Ideally, source content would be authored and managed in one system and delivered to many other systems. It requires a lot of effort to process transclusion links. That’s one reason why transclusion is not a general feature of HTML; it’s much easier to do the processing in the authoring environment and deliver the HTML content with the references already resolved.

Transclusion has been implemented in many XML applications, such as the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) content reference (conref) and map facilities. Many content management systems provide proprietary facilities for use-by-reference that can also be considered forms of transclusion.

About Eliot Kimber

Photo of Eliot Kimber

Eliot Kimber is a long-time developer of large-scale hyperdocument management systems; a contributor to supporting standards, including HyTime, XML, and DITA

Term:

Email: mailto:ekimber@contrext.com

Website: contrext.com

Twitter: @drmacro

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/eliotkimber/

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What is it?

A form of structured content that is designed, created, and delivered as discrete components within the content whole.

Why is it important?

Enables device-independent delivery in multiple contexts, at multiple levels of detail, and with varying consumer focus. It allows the content strategist to meet today’s delivery challenges and prepare for tomorrow’s unknowns.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

Nearly every product that we consume is now offered in more flavors, sizes, and styles than we could imagine just ten years ago. Manufacturing products this way is expensive, but successful organizations have figured out how to adapt. Content is product, and the traditional, hand-crafted development process for content is too resource intensive (creativity, intellect, and time) to be sustainable in a consumer- and technology-driven market.

By analyzing the structure and purpose of content, we can break it down into modular components that can be delivered to any device and easily modified for particular audiences or purposes. Modular content has the following common characteristics:

  • Design: What does a module of content look like? One approach starts with the concept of a topic: a chunk of information organized around a single subject. A topic is large enough to be self-contained from a writer’s point of view but small enough to be delivered in a variety of contexts.

  • Structure: There is no one-size-fits-all topic. You can create multiple topic types and what will define each one is its internal structure. By aligning the structure of a topic with its purpose, you can create a model for authoring and delivery that is repeatable and flexible.

  • Self-description: Modular content is a vehicle that is ready to take your ideas anywhere. Metadata puts gas in the tank. Describing your modular content with metadata will enable real-time delivery based on a set of rules that you define, and change, as necessary.

About Michael Boses

Photo of Michael Boses

Michael Boses pioneered the simple capture and multi-platform delivery of personalized content and continues to drive innovation in the content community. His success with large content initiatives has led many to consider him an authority on how to make web content creation seamless and efficient in an enterprise setting.

Term:

Email: mailto:mboses@contelligence.org

Website: contelligence.org

Twitter: @mboses

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/michaelboses/

Published on

What is it?

The practice of using content components in multiple information products.

Why is it important?

Developing reusable content that can be used in multiple places and output formats saves valuable resources, enforces consistency, and improves content quality and effectiveness.

Why does a content strategist need to know this?

Content reuse is a key tactical component of a content strategy. Efficient content reuse enables single sourcing and multi-channel publishing; enforces editorial consistency; conserves time and fiscal resources; and can help ensure accurate, compliant (and thus effective) content.

Efficient content reuse does not involve copy-and-pasting but uses transclusion, whereby content is authored in one location and used by reference in other locations. Many Extensible Markup Language (XML) architectures implement transclusion; perhaps the most well-known is the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). Many authoring systems and content management systems also include proprietary mechanisms for transclusion.

Companies can maximize content reuse by developing structured content that is standards-based and semantically rich. Content can be reused at different levels of granularity:

  • An entire information product

  • An entire topic or collections of topics

  • Elements of a topic

In addition, content can be designed so that conditional processing (filtering) can generate different variants of information products. A content analysis can determine the appropriate level of granularity. A reuse strategy should define the method of content reuse, what content should be reused, the granularity of reuse, how reused content is controlled, and who owns reused content.

You can effectively manage reused content by employing a content management system (CMS) to control access, determine where the controlled content is used, and identify potentially reusable content. When content is structured well, content managers can employ automation to power content reuse, for example by pre-populating information products with reused content or using tools such as Schematron to help prevent content authors from accidentally deleting the controlled content.

Author Information:

Name:

Kristen James Eberlein

Bio:

Kristen James Eberlein is an information architect who works with clients that use the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). She chairs the OASIS Technical Committee that develops the DITA standard.

Email:

kris@eberleinconsulting.com

Website:

http://eberleinconsulting.com

Twitter:

@kriseberlein

LinkedIn:

www.linkedin.com/in/kristeneberlein/

Phone:

(919) 682-2290

Address:

226 Monmouth Avenue Durham, North Carolina 27701-1908 USA

About Kristen James Eberlein

Photo of Kristen James Eberlein

Kristen James Eberlein is an information architect who works with clients that use the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). She chairs the OASIS Technical Committee that develops the DITA standard.

Term:

Email: mailto:kris@eberleinconsulting.com

Website: eberleinconsulting.com

Twitter: @kriseberlein

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kristeneberlein/