Content Without Borders: Using Ontologies to Publish Content Created by Different Departments

In 2017, Gartner declared ECM (enterprise content management) as dead. Meant we cannot live with a single repo or system for the entire enterprise. Each department has own rules, processes, responsibilities. We live in a multi-repo world.

A taxonomy, a classification system, was a partial solution to bridge the gaps between repos. Quite a few things a taxonomy does not tell us. Does tell us what products are involved in doc projects, if projects are region-specific, what characteristics should an activity have to be defined as a project.

Ontology includes taxonomy as its foundation, but also includes:

• Semantic relationships (which provide multiple perspectives, but amount can be huge and hard to foresee)
• Inference (dynamically generated new information that is logically based on existing information, which doesn't require us to foresee all possible combinations and enables multiple perspectives)
• Linkage (connection to your content)
• API (formats such as RDF, OWL, Semantic Web Rule Language, or Cycl)

You can use ontology editors to create ontologies, such as Protege and Fluent Editor, via API, or automatically, with tools such as Intuillion NLP or PoolParty.

To create an ontology, start with a taxonomy. Analyze how current content is linked. Do the links also represent semantic relationships? Figure out what the taxonomy does not tell us?