Contensis meta data framework

Enterprise content management is not just about ensuring you can create and maintain content, it is about ensuring that the content is indexed and catalogued in a way that can be useful in the future.

We have taken an extract from Wikipedia, which explains this quite neatly. 

Metadata (meta data, or sometimes metainformation) is "data about data", of any sort in any media. Metadata is text, voice or image that describes what the audience wants or needs to see or experience. The audience could be a person, group or software program. Metadata is important because it aids in clarifying and finding the actual data. An item of metadata may describe an individual datum, or content item or a collection of data including multiple content items and hierarchical levels, such as a database schema. See the original Wikipedia article for more information.

When you look at the purchase of any enterprise CMS it is important to ensure that it ticks all the boxes when it comes to meta data. For many of us, meta data may be important for SEO purposes, but this is just the tip of the iceberg, and we believe that intelligent cataloguing of your content can make the difference between a successful implementation and a failed implementation.

Making meta data assignment easy

The key to any successful meta data implementation, whether it be to meet the needs of a standard such as the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative or simply to meet the needs of your own internal requirements, is making it simple to enter the meta data.

Because meta data comes in so many different forms, we provide a range of options for making meta data entry straight-forward.

 

 

As you can see there is an option to suit every need, and if an option is not available then it is possible to hook in your own bespoke selection method.

Each of the options comes with a comprehensive set of options for both the source of the data and the validation. For example, with a tree selection you can allow single or multiple selection.

Achieving compliance to standards with your meta data implementation

Whatever your standard, whether it is bespoke or a public standard such as e-GMS or the Dublin Core, we support it.

Having worked across many industries, we are very familiar with the adherence to standards from a meta data perspective.

Often these standards are more prevalent in the public sector, where there is a common goal towards indexing content in a way which makes content more interoperable between different systems.

Many of the elements that make up these standards can be auto-generated from the context of the content within the CMS. We have, for example, implemented the Dublin Core standard on this site, but in fact as a user you are blissfully unaware of the implementation. The data to support the standard is generated automatically, but this can of course be done manually, if required.

As an example, one of the elements of the Dublin Core standard is the created date of the content. Well that's easy. We are using a CMS to generate the content, and the created date can be either the actual created date or the published date, for example. There is no need to manually enter any information.

Improving SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is a topic that is hot on everyone's agenda. From our point of view, SEO drives new business for us. In the case of a council, it enables people to get to the information they need quickly and efficiently, reducing potential costs in call handlers and other such services.

From a meta data perspective, SEO requires that we carefully assign keywords and a meta description to each of the web pages produced by the CMS.

Actually setting up keywords and description meta data can be done in a couple of clicks, but the hard part is ensuring users of the CMS fill in the data and create meaningful meta data.

Tagging makes keyword entry effortless.

For keywords, we tend to use a facility called tagging to actually tag the content. This facility allows the user to simply start typing the words and as soon as they type the first couple of characters the system will auto-suggest tags or keywords created by other users of the CMS. Using tags in this way helps to ensure consistency across your content and eradicates issues such as misspelt keywords.

If a user does misspell a keyword tag then the keyword spelling can be updated centrally and it will update all content that uses that tag.

Using the in-built meta data validation, it is possible to enforce the entry of any meta data before submission. This means that built into the workflow, you can ensure users are following the global requirements.

Because all meta data definitions allow help text to be entered, you can also prompt certain styles of meta data and a tense of writing.

Users need to understand that the description, for example, needs to make sense when read out of context, and ideally the tense and style of description will be consistent across the site. After all, if you carry out a search and get 15 different types of description the user will find it more difficult to engage with your site and what you are trying to help them with.

 

Using meta data to power parts of your website

There are a whole series of controls that inherently require meta data or use meta data. We will take a look at a selection of these.

Tag Clouds

Tag Clouds give your end users an alternative method of navigating for content. Often these are used when implementing Blogs but can be used for any implementation across the site, such as news or just general article content.

Assuming you have assigned a tag-based keyword meta data to content, you can then use a Tag Cloud control to navigate to content. This control works in much the same way as a navigational control, except that your are no longer navigating by hierarchy, but instead by tags. As you can see, there is also a Tag Breadcrumb, which is used in the place of or in addition to the normal breadcrumb control, and most of the standard list controls support filtering by tags. More information can be found about Blogs on the Blog Module section.

Taxonomy Filtering

Virtually all of our standard list controls fully support filtering by taxonomy.

On the University of Wales project, they wanted to provide a featured content area on the site. This featured content has a drop-down filter at the top which allows you to filter the data based upon the taxonomy that the content has been categorised under using meta data.

And much much more

Meta data is used to power virtually all of our standard controls, and is often used in many customer implementations to achieve specific requirements. We have a whole host of other controls and modules that use meta data inherently.