Wednesday, December 17

What is Structured Content?

Any Content Management System is only as good as the content it manages. In the past year, numerous studies have found a high rate of failure in the use of CMS. But it's not the content management systems that are failing; it's the content being put into the systems. "Unstructured" content - pages and pages of text - do not

• capitalize on the enormous potential of most content management systems, or
• allow people to readily use and understand the content.

"Structured" content - information broken down into discrete, well-defined modules of content - turns the information into

• searchable, taggable information blocks that can be re-used and re-purposed, and
• easy-to-understand and easy-to-use content for the people who need it for their jobs.

Information Mapping� is a research-based method for structuring content that maximizes the performance of both content management systems and the people using the content. Effective content management requires structured content.

By Attending This Event

Attendees will come away with answers to a series of questions that are crucial to any kind of information management initiative. Crucial, yet often overlooked questions, such as

• What is structured content? What does it look like? And why is it so essential?
  (We're not taking about the marked-up structure of HTML or XML, but the structure of the actual content organized and presented in a way that reflects what that content means.)
• What are the three elements that define structured content? Can we apply these elements to all types of content?
• And can this structured content serve its 2 masters:
  • the people who must understand it and
  • the technology that must search, find, and display it?

Speaker

Jim Purdy is Vice President of Communicare, a Toronto-based professional services company that helps customers across the country to better understand, structure, and present their corporate information using the Information Mapping� method of structured writing. For the past 8 years, he has helped document all manner of complex information for a wide range of major government and corporate clients, preparing the information for publication either on paper and/or in a variety of electronic online media. He also has trained and/or coached over a thousand professionals in the Information Mapping method, helping them apply its principles to their own content. Jim is a recognized documentation expert and Information Mapping Master Trainer.

References

• Jim Purdy, What is Structured Content?

Meeting: Wednesday, December 17, 2003

8:30 a.m. Registration & Continental breakfast; 9:00 Start; Expected finish 11:30

No advance reservations are required.

Location: Join us at The Ontario Club, 5th Floor, Commerce Court South 30 Wellington Street West (Bay and Wellington), Toronto

Membership: Attendance is free for IRMAC members. A guest fee of $20 applies to non-members.

Copyright © 2003 Information Resource Management Association of Canada. All rights reserved.
Revised: 2003-12-21.