History of Indexing & what exactly is 'semantic metadata?'

The Internet is the biggest library in the world -- with all the books on the floor.

-- unknown

I'm sure most of us have never spent even a minute or so pondering about the classification system that keeps libraries sane. But they weren't always pristine. According to editors at TheStraightDope.com, when Melville Dewey spent his junior year (1872-73) working in Amherst College's library, he was frustrated by the disarray of Amherst's collection. A real self-starter (apparently) Dewey examined how other libraries were organizing books. One method, which dated back to the Han Dynasty (206 BC - 9) was to assign books a given a spot on a shelf and log in a journal the location and book title. Another mode was to alphabetize the entire collection -- which created a fair amount of juggling when new books came in! Other libraries (harkening back to the Hellenic era) chose to organize by subject. But what constituted a subject? Sir Francis Bacon in the 1600s, said there were three branches of knowledge: history (deriving from memory), poetry (from imagination), and philosophy (from reason.) The Vatican said there were a pithy two: sacred and profane.

Dewey channeled his frustrations and within four years took the best of all the methods and developed a standard of classification and indexing that still exists today. The system consisted of combining "the analytical simplicity of decimal numbers to an intuitive scheme of knowledge, one that would fluidly accommodate all the books ever written, and all the books that could be written as well," said Mathew Battles, Library Historian. Further, Dewey's systems worked for any asset -- not just books.

Alas, Dewey's system for libraries has not been the way the Web sites are indexed -- although that is starting to change. Like Dewey, companies are starting to create federated classification systems for all of their content, creating Taxonomies and Authority Files for centralized knowledge management. Another term for this type of information is semantic tags -- or more accurately, semantic metadata. Most of the efforts to create semantic metadata have been largely manual, which, as Chris Hill says "is a losing proposition" with the deluge of content now being acquired and developed. The typical approach is tag "after the fact" is problematic as well - as it tends not to be comprehensive nor complying with classification standards that have been created.

As Nstein Technologies spokeswoman for the last 3 years, I've spoken on the subject of semantic metadata quite a bit, usually as the lone voice in the room uttering those words! So I was amazed last month when at two different DAM conferences semantic metadata was uttered by virtually every speaker! Yet, it was apparent that few in the audience understood the scope of what metadata could be.
It seems we are at a point in history when every knows they need metadata -- but really don't know the "aboutness" of the subject!!


So a trio of us are hosting a webinar next week on "Semantic Metadata 101: Your Assets are Bare Without It." Linguistics expert Sheila Woo (and Director of Product Development) and Nstein's Sales Engineer will be joining me on Wednesday, March 31, 10am EDT/ 3pm GMT.

If you are involved with managing large repositories of content, you head up knowledge management, you are a CMO looking to leverage content to drive readers, engage and cross promote products and services, then join us. They'll be plenty of time for questions -- just bring your own cookies and coffee.

Nstein's New 3S Boosts WCM Maturity

My first foray into Web content management (WCM) was back in early 1995 when we built a system to manage the content of two daily newspapers – including more than $100 million in Classified advertizing. We cobbled together a series of flat files with a nasty grey background that tiled. It wasn’t pretty but it served our needs at the time.

My second round at Web content management was in 1996 – when we realized that despite using HTML includes, trying to update the look and feel of two daily newspapers was improbable – and bordering on impossible – without putting everything into a database. Further, we were thwarted from our secondary goal of slicing and dicing content from our papers and our six radio stations into new “topic areas.” It was a manual laborer’s nightmare. Intrigued by CNET’s flexibility and ability to scale with large data sets, in early 1997, we became a beta site for Vignette’s StoryServer, which was a commercial product of CNET’s prototypical (and revolutionary!) WCM. (StoryServer is largely recognized as the first “real” WCM.) With it we could create new templates and indicate which stories would flow onto those templates. And when my company was bought by Gannett 6 months later, we had a fine infrastructure upon which to move the other three New Jersey papers. Later, long after I left, Gannett’s New Jersey papers were moved onto yet another platform – ostensibly to centralize many of the Gannett papers across the nation.

In his research, Forrester’s Stephen Powers did a fine job outlining this type of WCM evolution in his "Web Content Management  Maturity Model,” looking at the four different stages that companies fall into when it comes to addressing Web needs – from the Basic “just get it up there” stage to the Engagement stage. In this last plateau, executives (versus IT) sponsor building a framework that impacts marketing, business, IT and all business goals.

Of the 261 enterprise executives surveyed by Powers and his team, most companies fell in between the second, “Tactical,” and the third, “Enterprise,” stages. The challenge for Information and Knowledge Management (I and KM) professionals is that they “miss opportunities to treat WCM as critical plumbing rather than as an application silo, and they fail to see how WCM fits in to a broader persuasive content architecture,” writes Powers.

And while Powers rightly suggests these professionals use his guidelines to determine where they are on the Maturity scale to drive conversations internally it is also an initiative fraught with political landmines unless one happens to be working for enlightened despots!

There is another way. Nstein Technologies, which has been on the forefront of developing semantic analysis solutions for over a decade, has just launched its 3S platform. 3S allows Web content from disparate sites, of varying levels of maturity, to be automatically semantically annotated – and then “mashed” together so it can be sliced and diced into new topic pages. That static sister site that focuses only on carpeting now can easily be mashed together with content from another WCM that focuses on furnishings. The result – a richer engagement for your audience to be sure, but also the ability for business owners to create new, highly targeted sites that are subsets of the amalgamation of the two (or more) sites. Nstein smartly made the management of these microsites easy. Simply create a query and marry it to a theme – or template. It’s that simple. Nstein also allows the management of ad banners so you can promote products or services specific to this mashed up content.

Understanding where you are on the WCM maturity model is without a doubt important. But if management’s "maturity model" is lacking, Nstein’s 3S helps bridge these WCM stages quickly and painlessly.

Media M'nA Expected Up, Tools for Sharing/Repurposing Needed

Interesting report issued by Ad Media Partners, analyzing a survey of senior executives within leading media (traditional media and digital media) and marketing services (advertising, marketing services and digital marketing) businesses on prospects for industry mergers and acquisitions for 2010.

(Note: Blogger seems to have a problem with ampersands, which I don't recall encountering before, thus, I am abbreviating mergers & acquisitions with M'nA.)

Four out of five respondents (83% in marketing services and 80% in media) anticipate that M'nA by strategic buyers will be up in 2010. This is a dramatic turnaround from 2009 results when less than one-third of those surveyed anticipated activity would increase.  Executives overall weren't so certain about financial buyers, with half saying they would be active, and approximately 40% saying financial buyers would be flat.

As to be expected, the top two drivers for M'nA were:

• Attractive Buying Opportunities 52%
• Strategic Refocusing 49% 

Of course the success of any merger is predicated on the buyer achieving its goals to leverage assets and achieve some level of economies of scale. This will put greater pressure on IT departments to ensure that systems are aligned if not consolidated. Should be a great opportunity for DAM and other vendors who can help leverage content from various silos -- with minimal disruption to productivity.