The Archetypal UX Rationale Behind Content Knowledge Graphs
No talk about content, knowledge graphs and Linked data for rich user experiences, can do without the amazing Mike Atherton. If a content knowledge graph is the “How?” of radical user-centricity when it comes to knowledge and user experiences, then the idea of websites, driven by Linked Data and the Web as your CMS, are its “Why?”.
In this edition of the newsletter I want us to go through the case of BBC’s way of creating data-driven websites revolving around real-world things and their relationships rather than around tree-like architectures that hardly ever manage to capture the complexities of domain and business logic.
When I started working at the BBC, Tim Berners-Lee had just given his TED talk about Linked Data. It just made so much sense to connect not just the documents, but the things – people, places, objects – that the documents were about. If the whole web could be one big relational database, then it could be one big content management system. Which means anyone could create great products from almost nothing
cit. Swimming into the Depths of User Experience with Mike Atherton (I was priviliged to have a Dialogue with Mike in 2017 :-))
Findable, Pointable, Searchable and Sharable Content
It was in a must-see talk from 2013 (Beyond the Polar Bear • Mike Atherton • GOTO 2013), that Mike shared how “the BBC radically restructured their website using content-centered domain modelling to better map to user’s mental models, create a user experience based around meaningful connections between topics, and unlock a wealth of archive content to be more findable, pointable, searchable and sharable.”
Back then Mike and team viewed web content and the entire idea of information architecture for the Web like this: your home page is Google, the whole Web is your CMS and your users are humans and machines alike.
Technically, and before “content” graphs were even a thing, BBC radically restructured their website to better match how users think. By using content-centered domain modeling, they created meaningful connections between topics to unlock a wealth of archive content (ref. “How Does the Emergence of the Semantic Web Change the Way We Think About Information Architecture?).
Linked Open Data For Cohesive, User-friendly Experience
This method breaks down complex subjects into simpler ideas. As Michael Smethurst wrote, they combined several concepts like one web, persistent URIs, REST, Domain Driven Design, and Linked Open Data to create a more cohesive and user-friendly experience (cf. Smethurst, Michael. “BBC – Radio Labs: How We Make Websites”).
Such an approach allows a user to access content from anywhere, following their interest and being able to traverse topics and information about things, unobstructed by irrelevant to them and their knowledge quest presentation layers.
Domain-driven content and data modeling can be seen across BBC platforms, such as BBC WildLife and BBC Recipes. BBC Wildlife is available through Internet Archive here: “BBC Nature – Homepage” and BBC recipes, also being a good example of rich schema.org annotations, is available here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes
To cite Mike Atherton one more time, having interconnected content, based on domain and data modeling, allows a user to find a link to the used music in a given programme, for example. Having this link, a user can further explore what that music is, who is the performer and thus jump across websites finding novel connections and enriching their understanding.
Instead of an Epilogue: Agent Tom
I have a favourite vantage point to contemplate content and the Semantic Web from, and it is the movie Hyperland – a documentary film about hypertext and its surrounding technologies, written by Douglas Adams for BBC in the late 1990s.
Describing and predicting an approximation of the current state of the World Wide Web, the movie meets us with Tom, a software agent, who, in his own words, is “working tirelessly for you … [and] can provide access to any piece of information stored digitally anywhere in the world … for your interactive pleasure …”
In Tom’s words there are three goals we, as digital marketers and people working to create better content, websites and ultimately user experiences, need to aim for when weaving a successful digital identity:
- We want to help machines (and software agents like Tom) work tirelessly on our (and our audience’s) behalf
- We want to have our information easily found and accessed
- We need to make sure our audiences are happily connecting with the digital product, service or experience we have crafted.
Knowledge graphs built of content, I believe cater to all these three goals for the interactive pleasure of us all.
So does designing connnected content.
Let’s work towards building more of it!
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Thanks for reading this story, which is an unplugged version of the Knowledge Graphs stories I present in my book Being Dialogic. I would love to hear your thoughts on the subject of webby words.