[Sigia-l] That stuff we do, ontologically speaking

[Ruth Kaufman]

Hi Alexander,
Have you considered making this ontology about content types rather than
page types? The notion of page is disintegrating on the web. I did something
similar for ibm.com's content. I called it a "content type taxonomy", but in
reality, it was a taxonomy of page types. The reasons for that probably
wouldn't be too interesting. Anyway, we chose to call these content types to
be future-proof, as ibm moved to a more integrated and dynamic web delivery
platform.

The intent was to use this taxonomy as a set of allowed values for the HTML
metatag DC.Type across all of ibm.com's published web pages, including
application-created pages (4 million or so in all). The primary categories
were:

   - Site orientation (includes entry pages, home pages, landing pages,
   search pages/results, error pages, help content, etc.)
   - Account information (includes registration pages, user profiles,
   order history, etc.)
   - Purchase transaction enablement (for e-commerce stuff)
   - Technology information (white papers, etc.)
   - Business information (thought leadership, etc.)
   - Offering information (product descriptions, etc.)
   - Business partner enablement information (sales and marketing
   materials for business partners)
   - User assistance information (guides and such for users of IBM's
   products)
   - Support (technical support docs for troubleshooting, etc.)
   - Reference (for indexes, footnotes, glossaries, etc. -- literally
   reference material)
   - Communities (for blogs, wikis, etc.)
   - Events (events, obviously)
   - IBM information (all the corporate stuff and news about IBM)
   - Business partner information (partner directories, etc. -- for
   customers)
   - Conversion pages (for things like "thank you" pages)

One of the most interesting challenges was in creating the Events branch.
Sub-branches were:

   - Events calendar
   - Location-based event
   - Media-based event
   - Event replay
   - Event materials


The entire taxonomy was up to 4 levels deep (i.e., each branch could be no
more than 4 levels deep), so that's the 2 top levels. The interesting part
of this was getting people (many stake holders) to understand and accept
that this was literally a taxonomy, not a navigation scheme or object
model.

Another design point you may find helpful was that we tried, as much as
possible, to separate content type (our meaning was closest to "genre") from
presentation format and MIME type. In some cases this was impossible, such
as with the notion of "webcast". A lot is baked into that word. We actually
had webcast twice, but with different unique id's -- once as a media-based
event and once under event replay.

Finally, we tried to craft this taxonomy in the spirit of RDF -- meaning, in
a way that in the future, we could break it down into triples. This wasn't
practical for the particular initiative we were supporting last year, but we
went into it knowing how we would eventually parse out subjects (topics)
from content objects (containers / presentation formats). We validated that
each child was a "type of" its parent, so the RDF predicates, so to speak,
were consistent across the board.

You're calling your work an ontology. I suppose you're planning to establish
relationships among entities beyond the simple hierarchy? (You mentioned
topic maps.) Sounds interesting.

HTH,
Ruth


On Feb 8, 2008 7:33 AM, Alexander Johannesen <alexander.johannesen at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm making an ontology based on the work we IAs do, and would love
> some help and comments. This first step really is typification of
> pages only, albeit an important one. All pages are notated singular,
> even when plural makes sense. Format is ;
>
>   [type of pagetype]
>      pagetype
>      pagetype (comment)
>      pagetype
>
> Example ;
>
>   [entry page]
>      main (homepage)
>
> This means that any page typed as 'main' has a parent type of 'entry
> page', so if I make an main page called 'Home', the type hierarchy for
> this page is 'entry page' -> 'main' -> 'Home'. The comment is that
> this really is a homepage. Hope this makes sense, and if not, just
> ask.
>
> All of these are to explain the type of pages that go into any web
> site / application, and the idea is to map these out as generic as
> possible. Yes, there's going to be millions of things that aren't
> going to be on the list as I'm aiming for a smaller generic set. What
> sort of pages are typical i our daily work? Here's what I've got so
> far ;
>
> [entry page]
>   main (homepage)
>   index
>   category
>   section
>   area
>
> [utility page]
>   contact (also exists under the [feedback page] section)
>   about
>   sitemap
>   search
>
> [communication page]
>   news
>   blog
>   forum
>   chat
>   press-release
>
> [featured content]
>   article
>   faq
>
> [user-generated content]
>   comment
>   tag
>   relation
>   rating
>
> [feedback page]
>   Contact
>   Feedback
>   feed
>
> [application page]
>   login
>   logout
>   preferences
>   profile
>   customized index
>
> [legal page]
>   Copyright
>   End-user agreement
>   Legal
>   Privacy
>   Accessibility
>
>
> Thoughts, ideas and suggestions?
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Alexander (now in a much colder place than before)
> --
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>  Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
> ------------------------------------------ http://shelter.nu/blog/--------
> ------------
> IA Summit 2008: "Experiencing Information"
> April 10-14, 2008, Miami, Florida
>
> -----
> When replying, please *trim your post* as much as possible.
> *Plain text, please; NO Attachments
>
> Searchable Archive at http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/
> ________________________________________
> Sigia-l mailing list -- post to: Sigia-l at asis.org
> Changes to subscription: http://mail.asis.org/mailman/listinfo/sigia-l
>