Seybold San Francisco 2004

Today and tomorrow I'm attending the Content Management intensive seminar at Seybold San Francisco 2004. So far today we learned a lot about Digital Asset Management and Taxonomies.

Digital Asset Management
Managing your assets is the first step in creating a full-blown content management system. Assets are where it's at, baby! :-) Seriously, assets are all the items on your Web site, from your images, your PDFs, your executables, and your Web pages. Anything at all really. And if you don't have them under control, you can't really manage them with an ECMS. So the first session was an intense round-table discussion about DAM (or MAM as the woman from Disney called it). Once you've got your assets under control, then you are ready to manage the content that is in them.

Taxonomies
Taxonomies are what make it possible to find the information, or content, within your DAM or CMS. These are the controlled vocabularies or thesauri that make up your information.

What does that mean, in English? Basically, every set of information can be organized into a set of topics. These topics, when arranged hierarchically can be said to be a taxonomy. For example, in the animal kingdom, you could say that a bloodhound is a kind of dog which is a kind of mammal which is a kind of animal. If you then had information about bloodhounds, you would store it in the Animals > Mammals > Dogs > Bloodhounds category, and that would be your taxonomy.

Three one-hour sessions in the afternoon went into detail about taxonomies, why to use them, how to build them, and a case-study of how one company (with over 50,000 terms in their thesaurus) went about creating and using a taxonomy. It was very interesting.

You can expect to see more, in the weeks to come, about how you can use DAM and taxonomies on your sites to make information retrieval more useful to you and your customers.