Insights

Taxonomy Boot Camp 2024 Themes & Takeaways

Two weeks ago it was again my pleasure and privilege to attend Taxonomy Boot Camp (TBC) in Washington, DC. This was TBC's 20th year, and, in the four times I've attended since 2016, was the strongest argument yet for the enduring importance of well-designed and integrated taxonomies. In addition to tracks for "taxonomy fundamentals," this year's event featured tracks for "taxonomy applications," "taxonomy operations," and "advanced data and semantic layers." This is my roundup of the themes and insights that stood out to me most.

Deskilling Large Language Models

Modern AI products make a lot of promises around the "expertise" delivered by their models. Sometimes, though, another expert is not what I (or my clients) need. “Deskilling” replaces the "magic" of an LLM "figuring everything out" with structured, predictable steps and then uses language models as the glue between natural language and computational tasks.

Elemeno Health Structured Content Design & Development

I helped the micro-learning education startup Elemeno Health design, develop, and release a structured content solution to more effectively create, publish, and reuse thousands of hyperlocal, clinician-focused resources at patient care locations across the country. Elemeno's content now works harder and lasts longer, allowing it to scale more effectively over time and deliver greater value to Elemeno customers.

The Informed Life: Structured Content

In this episode of "The Informed Life," Jorge Arango and I discuss the role of structured content in making complex ideas clear online. Topics include the transition from traditional web pages to a data-centric web design, the role of information architecture in making complex information systems accessible and intelligible to both humans and machines, and the challenges and opportunities in using semantically sound structured content to enhance digital information's usability and accessibility.

Earley IA Podcast: Knowledge Graphs & IA

Taxonomy Boot Camp 2022 Themes & Takeaways

Last week I had the pleasure and privilege of attending the 18th annual Taxonomy Boot Camp in Washington DC. This year’s conference carried on its strong tradition of ideas, talks, and workshops for neophytes and experts alike, and, as always, provided much food for thought. Here’s a roundup of the themes and topics I saw recurring across talks, plus (as always) a bit of commentary on where I see them fitting into the bigger picture of designing information spaces that are easy to understand and pleasant to use.

Structured Content and the Headless CMS

Are you still trying to wrap your head around what structured content is, how to use it, and what the benefit is to the folks who use your content? One way to think of it is that structured content treats information as a set of ideas, concepts, and facts to communicate, each described in a way that conveys its meaning in a machine readable way. Here's a brief illustration to demonstrate what that looks like.

Domain Modeling for Structured Content

Domain modeling helps organizations discover the information structures and meaning that allow structured content to reach further and last longer. By uncovering the assumptions and tacit rules that plague your content ecosystem, domain modeling can help you facilitate the shared vision necessary to create resilient, scalable systems for communication across channels.

Boutique Knowledge Graphs: Creating Smart Content at Any Scale

By situating data in context, knowledge graphs create valuable opportunities for content creation, recommendation, and management—even at small scales. A boutique approach to knowledge graph design offers a scalable strategy for starting out small and solving well-defined communication and discovery problems to create measurable value.

Structured Content Design Workflow 2022

Structured content design focuses on communicating effectively to an organization’s patrons, constituents, and customers, wherever they are and however they choose to access content. While it is the cornerstone of effective, scalable content design for the web, it’s also much more than just a “web” technique: it is a way to prioritize effective communication across contexts.