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Teodora Petkova

  /  Intertextuality   /  Linked Data At Play, Literally: The Electronic Arts’ Way
Screenshot from Aaron Bradley's presentation of EA's Knowledge Graph at Contenful: "The evolution and convergence of content and knowledge management
Intertextuality, Knowledge Graph Stories

Linked Data At Play, Literally: The Electronic Arts’ Way

In 2018 Aaron Bradley, a compulsive categorizer and one-time student of semiotics, currently Senior Structured Content Architect at Telus Digital, knew that schema.org is Linked Data’s Gateway Drug and probably anticipated the upcoming use of other drugs like intelligent content and knowledge graphs for content.

Enter Electronic Arts’ (EA) approach to categorizing, describing and distributing digital content.

EA’s Knowledge Graph for Content

With millions of people playing video games and interacting with EA, you can imaging the content challenges when it comes to managing systems, databases and environments, all of which are potential touchpoints of interaction between players and the content that mattered to them.

Having volumes of content spanning across websites, apps, APIs etc, scale, consistency and relevancy were the targets EA was after. To hit these targets, EA worked on structurally modelling and semantically describing the content in EA’s ecosystem, forging an entity-based understanding of available content.

The Linked Data Light At the End of the Content Funnel

What if content was not just a blob, but a set of structured elements that can be sliced, diced, reordered and shaped as to meet the content needs of the person on the other side of the screen?

What if content could be tagged in a way that would allow more precise personalization and a lower cost and better content recommendation with less effort from the content team?

Part of any intelligent content talk, these questions got their answers through Aaron Bradley and EA’s team walk of the Linked Data road. It was Aaron Bradley and Eamonn Glass who embarked on finding a solution to the challenges related to maintaining multiple websites, social media platforms, and in-game platforms and communication.

EA used schema.org to manage the data (and thus the content) of over 1,000 game titles and more than 7 million indexed web pages and documents The figures are from Aaron Bradley’s slides available at: https://www.slideshare.net/aaranged/semantics-at-play-electronic-arts-linked-data-journey  ) 

Technically, the company used structured data to enrich the content of game titles, web pages and documents. This allowed content creators to use structured content that automatically feeds into various media channels, including social networks, apps, video platforms, websites, catalogs, search engines, and more.

Content Problems And Linked Data Solutions

Among the major problems siloed content creation and management brings to the table of serving the right content to the right people, as defined as 5 major problem areas regarding EA’s approach to the creation, classification, and distribution of digital content (ref. https://lis653.wordpress.com/2019/01/29/semantics-at-play-electronic-arts-linked-data-journey/ )  are:

  1. Published document metadata incomplete, inconsistent or missing
  2. Primitive and non-interoperable classification of documents
  3. Localization reliant on content duplication
  4. Limited publishing endpoints supported
  5. Multiple content management systems and associated processes

I am sure these are not specific to EA, but obstacles we all face when working with enterprise content. 

In the case of EA, The knowledge graph for EA’s content and data allowed them, among many other things intelligent content does, to start “making content decisions based on an ontological understanding of the person, the products and the world.” , to cite Michele Ann Jenkins from a recent Larry’ Swansons podcast https://ellessmedia.com/csi/michele-ann-jenkins/ 

In practice and not limited to EA’s knowledge graph built of content objects, semantic technologies enabled semantically enriched, standardly described and interoperable content which in turn translates into immersive experience for users, fitting their preferences, consumption habits, topics of interests.

Screenshot from Aaron Bradley's presentation of EA's Knowledge Graph at Contenful: "The evolution and convergence of content and knowledge management

From a marketing communication perspective, such a knowledge graph, providing personalized connected experiences is a bliss for those of us who want to built a continuum of marketing communications across websites, apps, and other platforms, not to mention the SEO benefits that modeling with schema.org can bring.

Instead of an Epilogue: Where do you start creating a knowledge graph strategy?

It was a real pleasure to get back to Aaron and his work during the preparation of this edition. My favorite (and I am biased) fossil from the past was this answer by Aaron to the question Where do you start creating a knowledge graph strategy?. Further, I gathered some resources for us to indulge in, when going down the content graph rabbit hole, which Aaron has been traveling for some time now. Of course the main entry to that hole being the metadata and structured data talk about SEO: https://web.archive.org/web/20190310230724/http://www.seoskeptic.com/ (Thanks Internet Archive!)
As you can see, the metadata and structured content talk is old and deep. And it looks like The Rise of the Metadata Warrior is coming of age… Again.

❤️Thanks for reading this story, which is an unplugged version of the Knowledge Graphs stories I present in my book Being Dialogic.

Image and screenshots from: https://www.contentful.com/events/fast-forward-2020-evolution-and-convergence-of-content-management-ea/ 

Other resources to indulge in:

The emergence of content knowledge graphs in a marketing context with the wonderful Ellie Young: https://watch.knowledgegraph.tech/videos/ke-aaronbradley

Slides (What’s wrong with Slideshare :-)):  Semantics at Play: Electronic Arts’ Linked Data Journey https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/semantics-at-play-electronic-arts-linked-data-journey/100814618 

Other useful resources on the topic:

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