Scott Hudson, Sr. Mgr, Content Architecture, and Eliot Kimber, Sr. Staff Content Engineer, opened their presentation with a song about taxonomy using a very Wicked/Wizard of Oz theme.
The land of documentation chaos (before taxonomy) customers were Dorothy, lost in a confusing landscape, no clear path, no consistency, really needed a Yellow Brick Road.
How do we help Dorothy? How do we classify content in a way that works for both authors and customers? The goals: Better navigation, fully classified, and good governance.
Classification has three major components: automated classification, authored classification, and governance. The automated part is assisted by AI, but the authored is the human oversight.
DITA SubjectScheme maps define consistent terms, define authoring consistency, and enable powerful navigation. It's not magic, but a structure, scalable solution.
Without a structured taxonomy, content becomes the Wicked Witch, powerful but misunderstood. Customers struggle with findability, duplicate search results, and inconsistency.
It takes time to properly classify content. Start small, then scale. Balance automation and human input. Governance is key.
Formal taxonomy of subjects for products and features, user roles and personas, and other domains as needed. All managed by a corporate taxonomy group and applies to all content. It includes a formal change process and is accessible via REST API.
Markup requirements include capturing taxonomic classification in topics, using taxonomy ID to connect to master taxonomy, enabling reliable automatic updating of documentation source, and using built-in element types and attributes. An audit trail tracks classification actions over time.
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