Intelligent Content by any other name
Whenever I look in the pantry for something for lunch, I rely on the labels on cans to make my selection easier. Without labels and information on the outside of the can, it would just be a mystery can... something I might open only if I were desperate to know what was inside. Information about a product makes it more responsive to the needs of a seeker. In the world of content, such endowment is sometimes called Intelligent Content.
As a brand for use in the content industry, the term "Intelligent Content" has traction and identity for product capabilities, courses, describing professional skills, and even as a conference name. What it implies for the content is that it is part of a system that expects content to have predictable and expected structure, semantic identification of its components, properties that support selective use of components, and a context of terminology and relationships to other content that the system can use to support improved and more selective search, localization, globalization, personalization, and other high-function demands.
So as a content engineer, I find the analogy is not quite right for the operations that normally need to be performed on content. The term implies that the content exerts logic, whereas the opposite case is more applicable: content in storage has no intrinsic agency or intelligence. For ideal management and retrievability, content must have the right structure and properties for logic to query it and for processors to manipulate it. The intelligence that we speak of is in the ability of automation to use the features that enable intelligent use of such content.
So as I noodle about possible new branding for how content producers need to envision their tools and tasks, here are some options and assessments I came up with:
- Smart Content--still implies agency, as if content is pushing itself out to readers and applications.
- Enabled Content--this works for me, but I'm not sure why. They story needs teased out.
- Augmented Content--this term could imply the value of the relationship and taxonomic properties that can be imbued onto content, and does not deny the intrinsic nature of structured and semantic content. But is the sound of it kitschy, like Augmented Reality?
- Nurtured Content--I like this. It represents care invested in getting a good return. But this is also the view from the human side of the content creation and interaction. From the query engine viewpoint, this "nurtured" content is more like a school child, absorbing new capability and becoming more performant. So who is the branding for? Is it for authors who need to be induced to care about good content (where I think the nurturing story applies)? Or is it for tool-makers who need better hooks in the content to build better delivery services (where enablement applies)?
- Actionable Content--this seems best in the sense of enabling operations on it. If you create content with architected structure and meaning and metadata, it is actionable. If you just create blobs of characters with punctuation, using it is like nailing jello to the wall.
This has not been an exhaustive brain dump... I think I'll come back to the idea later. My best shot for now seems to be "Actionable Content," but I'm aware that the content engineer in me may be perking up at the prospect of creating that logic!
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