The semantic web and content management
The semantic web is considered by many to be the next big thing on the web. And it is highly related to content management as most websites run on a cms of some sort.
From a web of documents
The web of documents is an expression for the traditional way websites are built. It’s a page-centric way of structuring and thinking about the content.
The Web of Documents is the way the web started out. People wrote content and published web pages. The text had links to other pages as part of the content. This worked fairly well for some time, but as demands from modern web sites grew, problems with the page-centric way of managing a website
became more obvious.
Challenges with a Web of Documents
The Web of Documents can not handle highly structured data. Machines struggle to understand the content, as it was originally designed to be read by people.
Irrelevant search results
Machines do not understand the content very well, thus leading to irrelevant search results.
Poor navigation
A tree structure is often a poor way of presenting information to the user, as it is often difficult to find the correct information. Tagging and classification systems are common attempts to fix those problems, but they are only band-aids on a broken way of working with content.
Not suited for multichannel publishing
With the rapid advances of alternative channels for publishing content, being able to reuse your content in multiple channels with a minimum of effort is a goal many companies strive for. With a page-centric model this is difficult to achieve without a lot of effort.
To a web of data
The Web of Data is an expression for describing the modern web where websites have moved beyond a page centric world. Most websites have functionality that demands better structured content than a page centric approach can give them.
The web of data provides websites with better internal structure and opens up for uses beyond regular page centric publishing. A CMS that supports the web of data, gives you many advantages over page centric content management systems:
- A content based navigation, where the properties of the content and how it relates to other content, decides where it is shown in the website, and not where the editor has decided to put it in a hierarchical structure. Navigation becomes more natural and intuitive.
- Support for advanced functionality and content structures, which are normally seen in web
applications written from scratch. You manage all content in the same user-friendly interface.
Challenges with the web of data
While a CMS system that supports the web of data is a big leap forward from page-centric solutions, some of the challenges with page-centric solutions also apply to solutions that support the web of data.
This mainly applies to integrations, and sharing of data with other systems, which is still difficult and often ad-hoc. The lack of standards creates variations in formats and data structures. But there is a solution:
The semantic web - getting more out of your content
The web is evolving rapidly. New technologies and channels for delivering your content are appearing at a rapid pace. Some of the major technologies that are set to shape the web of tomorrow are the technologies related to the semantic web.
The semantic web is about helping machines understand the content of a web page. Today, machines can retrieve and display the web pages you ask for, but the computer has no way of understanding
what the web pages are about, except inaccurate text analysis, like the current search engines are doing.
The semantic web technologies enable computers to understand the meaning of
the content on your website. This opens up a whole host of improvements:
- Better search and filtering internally in your site
- Content based navigation
- Expose data to let other people easily integrate with you, or deliver your content in other channels (mobile, tablets, TVs etc).
- Integrate with others in a similarly easy fashion.
- Improved information in search results on Google with Rich Snippets (utilizes websites with semantic tagging).
- Improved search results from search engines. Specify what type of content (people, report, event, travel destinations etc) you want to search for.
- Find related content: paintings are related to painters, actors are related to movies. Movies are related to studios, cinemas and reviews.
Why aren’t more websites using semantic web technologies?
The cost and effort needed to create semantic web solutions is still very high. This is mainly due to a lack of support for semantic technologies in content management systems. Today, the vast majority of
websites are powered by a CMS of some sort. Most content management systems cannot support semantic data models (many are still in the Web of Documents stage). They are not able to support the full semantic web. Webnodes CMS has a semantic data model, and supports a range of semantic web technologies.