A sandal, a semiotic trail and the Semantic Web

Meaning is not given by a pre-encoding that strictly associates a signifier with a signified or with a class of signifieds. It was produced along routes that separate and connect the signified to each other, passing by the signifiers. The sign is only a stop along the interpretive route.

Paraphrasing by memory several insights from Rastier, 2003.

Antiquity. The Agora is full of buzz, people meet to discuss, sell, buy, stroll. We see a place vibrating with commerce, public discourse, and social life deeds. And there, all of a sudden, a trail tacitly catches our attention. It is from a sandal. A prostitute’s sandal. The trail reads “follow me” and was left on the dusty street somewhere in Ancient Greece, as an invitation to a client… 

Leaving semiotic trails in a cybermarketscape

If we allow ourselves to interpret the scenario (which is a communication scenario per se, where a message is being sent, potentially eliciting response (action) in the light of dialogic moments throughout the continuum of our marketing communication on the Web, we will be able to see this as leaving semiotic trails in a cybermarketscape, creating conditions for a dialogue to happen. 

DIALOGIC MOMENTS
Dialogic moments are fleeting, typically unplanned, instances where partners experience being both present and open to the other’s experience. 
Deliberation Storytelling and Dialogic Moments

I can’t think of a more literal, although controverisal (both in terms of provenance and in terms of the ethics of the paralel), way of understanding marketing communication in the days when the Web of Data is now clearly part of more and more digital marketing strategies. Just like a set of metadata – left as a paratextual element, enriching the interactive aspect of the message and the meaning it carries (and has the potential to evoke), this imprint is a call to action in the public sphere. So are the metadata we use to describe marketing communications artifacts.

THE WEB OF DATA
The core objective of the Web of Data is to publish content on the Web in formats that machines can process more easily and accurately than the human-friendly HTML documents forming the current “Web of Documents”. As the Web becomes increasingly machine readable, increasingly complex tasks can be automated on the Web, yielding more and more powerful Web applications that are capable of discovering, cross-referencing, filtering, and organising data from numerous websites in a matter of seconds. [Aidan Hogan, In: The web of data ]

Publishing content on the Web as walking along the cyber routes of the Semantic Web

On the Web, we imprint a “follow me” with metadata soles – leaving a trail as a paratextual element, while at the same time enriching the interactive aspect of the message and the meaning it carries (and has the potential to evoke).

 The  four-thousand-year-old sandal becomes an epitome of how with creating and publishing content for the Web we walk along the cyber routes of the Web, imprinting messages to creatively (or sometimes not) engage people.

Metadata today is inseparable from the creative process. And by creative process I not only mean ideation but also all the thinking and mostly talking, we as digital marketing people do before the inking of any content piece. It is a dialogic process we go through to reach a shared understanding of where we stand as a brand, what are the main concepts that describe what we do, what words we use, how we use them, in what context and when. And the same goes for the dialogic processes we go through when searching how people find us, what words they use, what are the queries related to the path through which people find solutions.

That dialogic process is about distilling important concepts and interlinking them into a model that to an extent reflects the relationships of the domain we are in and the business we operate is related to. And the thinking and talking involved are very much alike the thinking and talking involved in creating machine-readable formalizations of things. The latter is my quick oversimplification of the beautiful, vast topic of the Semantic Web.

THE SEMANTIC WEB
The Semantic Web and the technologies used in its construction let us dream again of universal access to knowledge, which in a more modern and technological way we would call something like: “interoperable access to distributed digital knowledge.”

[Charles McCathieNevile & Eva Méndez in Knitting the Semantic Web]

For a deeper dive here’s an article (The Semantic Web: 20 Years And a Handful of Enterprise Knowledge Graphs Later ) I would have never written if it wasn’t for Atanas Kiryakov, Ontotext’s CEO and co-author of Semantic Annotation, Indexing, and Retrieval who opened the door for some insightful differentiation and sharing his practical experience with building things with strings) .

I believe if married, these two ways of distilling and using concepts are what can help us leave meaningful trails across the Web for people to follow through.

And I am not alone in looking to connect structured data to digital marketing communication.

Content, as Aaron Bradley highlighted in a recent interview, does not only mean website, it also means data points.

Put your Metadata Warrior Hat and Do More Thinking Before Leaving Semiotic Trails

The Semantic Web way forward is what I aim to promote and work for in my research and professional practice. I believe its affordances are what can help digital marketing communication not only be efficient but also be respective to the environment of the Web. And we have a lot of work to do. 

That said, it is high time we started thinking about content, even in our creative briefs,  through the lens of the metadata interpretative routes its messages travel. (Kudos  to Jason Scott for the Metadata Warrior expression)

I find  Mike Andrews’ diagram an excellent start. It is from his book Metadata basics for web content : the unification of structured data and content .

You don’t need me to tell you that, well described with metadata, the marketing text on the Web is also a potential that can at any moment be activated or generated, through (textual or voice) searching, querying, sharing by the autonomous (as Castells very well noticed long time ago in the context of his networked society research), searching, more importantly constantly writing and reading the Web user.  As noted by Inman et al. (In Business metadata : capturing enterprise knowledge), in the context of the organization there are many systems, programs, and databases that drive the need for metadata management, because with the advancement of technologies such as Google search, users are increasingly attuned to easily discover content and quickly get their business-related questions answered. Same authors also highlight the value of metadata to organizations, in the following benefits for content management, namely:

• Well-described and metadata-classified information saves time and effort; 
• Metadata allows the creation of a repository of available content that can be reused and accessed more easily.

What you may be need me to remind you of is the beauty of the Semantic Web, its vision, its ever maturing technologies and the tools that are beginning to shape, related to using semantic technologies for web content (Wordlift to mention just one which began the journey that now many other tools are on).

EPILOGUE: The Streets of Cyberia

The extent  to which we acknowledge the material our “soles” are made of, is the extent to which we are able to leverage the Web as a sea of knowledge and limitless playground for creative engagement by marketing communication content and bringing people together. It is when we use semantic metadata that we can invite more people to follow the footsteps we leave in the “dust”‘ on the streets of Cyberia while at the same time keeping that digital realm that belong to all of us clean and machine-readable 💙.

Stay tuned for my (slowly :)) upcoming book Being Dialogic. Where I straddle interpretive routes to better understand, connect and apply the concepts of the Semantic Web, intertextuality and dialogic communication in digital marketing communication.

Thanks for reading!

Related Resources: 

INMON, W. et al. The Value of Business Metadata Management. S.l.: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2008, 25-35.

CASTELLS, Manuel. Communication power. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. p.58RASTIER, F., Arts et sciences du texte, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2001. (I used the Bulgarian translation from 2003)