Michele Ann Jenkins: Taxonomy as the Foundation of Semantic Architecture – Episode 200

Content Strategy Insights

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Michele Ann Jenkins Through her taxonomy and other information architecture work, Michele Ann Jenkins helps people across the organizations she works with align their mental models and terminology usage. This alignment of concerns and language forms the foundation of the semantic architecture that is so crucial to modern content systems. We talked about: her work as a consultant focusing on taxonomy but also working on information architecture, search, digital asset management, ontologies, knowledge graphs, and AI the focus at her consultancy on technology-agnostic frameworks and best practices, including governance the threshold at which to move from a CMS's built-in taxonomy tools to a dedicated taxonomy management tool her description of the semantic layer and how it can help span organizational silos the benefits of a technology-agnostic enterprise content model and how far most organizations are from having one how the practice of taxonomy can help stakeholders understand each others' mental models and terminology how the well-established idea of "concept-based indexing" can help bring semantic clarity to terminology work and take projects from taxonomy to ontology the baby steps an organization can take into ontology and an example of how an ontological representation of enterprise knowledge can help auto-tag content coming from different sources and infer levels of trust some interesting examples of rule-based classificiations going haywire her exposure to working with a "content graph" with a complex globally distributed product how to find the "creative edge" where the capabilities of computers end and only human judgement is necessary the enduring importance of governance, people, processes, consensus building, and using open standards that permit interoperability Michele's bio Michele And Jenkins, MLIS, is an information management consultant specializing in taxonomy-driven content strategy. She has more than 20 years’ experience working with organizations across various industries, including Harvard Business Publishing, EA Games, and the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR). Michele takes a holistic approach to information and content management, drawing from a multidisciplinary background in programming, IA/UX design, information science, and publishing. She is skilled at guiding clients through the entire content management process: from creating high-level strategic roadmaps through development, implementation, and migration to ongoing support and training. Prior to joining Dovecot Studio in 2012, Michele was an independent consultant focusing on web development projects including large scale migrations, platform integrations, and implementing taxonomy-driven IA designs. Michele has over 15 years of experience customizing, coding, and developing IA for Drupal CMS. Michele has contributed a chapter to “Taxonomies: Practical approaches to developing and managing vocabularies for digital information” (Facet Publishing, 2022). She is also a regular guest lecturer and occasional course instructor at McGill University, where she earned a Master’s in Library and Information Studies with a specialization in knowledge management. She frequently presents at conferences including DrupalCon and Taxonomy Bootcamp (part of KMWorld). Connect with Michele online Dovecot Studio maj at dovecotstudio dot com Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/LTfQrfOiIkk Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 200. The practice of taxonomy plays a crucial role in tying together the worlds of content management and semantic practice. Michele Ann Jenkins is an information management consultant who specializes in taxonomy. Her work helps stakeholders understand each others' mental models and terminology and ensconce them in technical content systems. For all of the tech, though, she's always aware of where computing capabilities end and only human judgement will do. Interview transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 200 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show, Michele Jenkins. Michele's a senior consultant at Dovecot Studio. I don't know what kind of ... consultancy based in Montreal, she's got years of experience in both web development and information science, information architecture, taxonomy. So welcome Michele. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Michele: Hi, thank you so much. Yeah, my name's Michele and I am a consultant. We focus on all things related to taxonomy, but that tends to be sort of the linchpin into the broader world of information architecture, search, digital asset management, and more and more we're seeing people branch out into more semantic structures to support ontologies and knowledge graphs and artificial intelligence processes. So some of the things on my plate these days are designing a strategy for enterprise search for a European organization with over 220 different content repositories. I work with other organizations that are much more web focused, a lot of Drupal sites, SharePoint, WordPress. And then whether it's within content management system, organizing that content for dynamic delivery and menus and filtering and sorting, or getting things to talk to each other so that we're supporting editorial workflows across multiple systems such as a product inventory, going to a website, going to a blog, going to a different website, and then to a customer relation management tool and a digital asset management tool. So all those sort of acronym soup that we see everyone dealing with these days. Larry: Nice. Well, it sounds like you're really out in the future on this because when we first met about a month ago at a content management conference in Montreal, you did this great presentation where you kind of set the whole talk up around this notion of these ... That most ecosystems are not like the ones you just described. I mean, this is why people hire you, that there's these clunky, fragmented content ecosystems with multiple different CMSs, different instances of the same CMS. And the culmination of that in your presentation was there's just no Marie Kondo in sight. There's no organization here. So how do you go from ... How do people know to find you? And then what's the process for helping them along this way to the better semantic understanding of their content? Michele: Yeah, well, it's a real niche area to be working in. So generally people don't wake up in the morning and say what we need is a taxonomist. They're kind of thinking in terms of we are setting up a new system and we need it to do something, or we're realizing that these pain points of manual processes are just untenable. We see people with very content-driven ecosystems that still involve downloading a spreadsheet and emailing it to someone, or calling someone or having to manually sync things between systems and reconcile different language. Michele: And sometimes people just go ahead and Google and try and figure out who can help us with this very particular area. In other cases, we find that a lot of times the vendors are sending people to us. So if you're setting up a digital asset management tool, they might demo, "Look at all this great metadata. We are able to manage hierarchical taxonomies and synonyms." And people are like, "We don't have any of that" and they don't know what it is.And so we might have a vendor who says, "Why don't you go talk to these folks, see if they can help you out, and then you'll be able to take advantage of what's in our system." Michele: Most of our business is through referrals, so we just sort of have some good street cred and word of mouth. It's very small world. There's not that many people who really sit down and focus on taxonomy and semantic structures outside of their particular platform or tool or the broader web development vision. And sometimes it can fall by the wayside a little bit when people are caught up in that bigger idea of migrating content, designing visual layers, designing navigation, and really thinking about this plumbing behind the scenes when you've got the whole house to build can be difficult. Larry: Yeah, well, as you talk about that, I'm reminded of the increasingly or more frequently decoupled architectures that a lot of content people are working in. The separation, because it used to be with the old monolithic CMSs that everything end to end was in there, out to the templated outputs of it. You mentioned a number of different CMSs. Do you typically work with a certain category of CMS or are you in all these different architectural scenarios? Michele: So we try and design technology-agnostic frameworks. We're building off of best practices. There's an ANSI standard for taxonomy. You have your SKOS standard for capturing taxonomy in RDF. You've got obviously the whole world of ontology and OWL and all that. And so we come from an initial place that's talking about a lot of non-technology things like governance. How do you decide what terms you're going to use in a taxonomy? How do you define what the facets of your taxonomy are going to be? And those are true regardless of the system. And then we have to take into account the reality, and sometimes the reality is that a lot of CMSs don't handle synonyms or don't let you create taxonomy term metadata to extend what you can do with they're calling them categories, or they're calling them topics or tags. And you don't have the ability to say, make a relationship between the two of them or even a hierarchy. So we even still see systems that can only manage a flat list and aren't going to know that grapes are a kind of fruit and cats are a kind of animal. Michele:

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