Speakers
Robert Berry, Information Developer, IBM
Michael Harris, Information Architect, IBM
Erik Hennum, Information Model Architect, IBM
Paul Wlodarczyk, Director Solutions Consulting, Earley & Associates

Many organizations have turned to component-oriented content to create more sophisticated knowledge products, in more languages, at lower cost. For most organizations these days, component content is achieved by using DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture. Finding content in your file system or content repository is hard enough when you’ve got simple text documents to deal with. When you’re using DITA and other component-oriented methods, you increase the difficulty by two or three orders of magnitude, because you’re looking for smaller needles in bigger haystacks. It’s logical that DITA users would turn to taxonomy and metadata to improve findability of their reusable content.

Our research confirms that organizations that use XML authoring are more mature than their peers with respect to the adoption of best practices for search and metadata. However, the use of native DITA metadata capabilities is rare, and many are also missing out on opportunities to use taxonomy for reuse and improved findability. We will explore the metadata capabilities within DITA and component content management systems, discuss two major benefits that can be achieved by using descriptive metadata and taxonomy, and recommend some best practices for getting started with metadata for component-oriented content.

Check out the preview on SlideShare:

Date: Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Time: 1:00 – 2:00 Eastern Time
Cost: $50 (Survey respondents need not register and will receive an invitation to this call at no cost)

Register here.

Four years ago, a benchmark survey was conducted to understand how organizations understood and applied metadata to content assets and what business benefits they were realizing. Earley & Associates along with Taxonomy Strategies, launched a project to update this research. The goal of the study was to measure industry progress on a Metadata Maturity Model scale, a road map designed to help practitioners get started – and continuously improve – content tagging within organizations.

Preliminary results have shown that organizations that are more mature in metadata and taxonomy best practices outperform less mature organizations, with more mature organizations reporting findability and content management problems 10-15% less often. In addition to presenting results around maturity levels, this call will benchmark current search, taxonomy, and metadata practices against the 2005 survey and report on some surprising key findings around information access and best practices adoption.

Register here.