Lesson 6 — Content Strategy, Information Architecture & Search
Content Strategy
Content Strategy aligns creation, management, ownership, reuse, channels and lifecycle with business objectives. It asks:
- What content should exist?
- Why does it exist?
- Who is the audience?
- Who owns it?
- Which channels matter?
- How are reuse/versioning/lifecycle governed?
- How will success be measured?
Information Architecture
IA organizes the information environment so users can navigate, browse, search and retrieve it. Artifacts can include:
- navigation maps;
- Metadata maps;
- controlled vocabularies;
- taxonomies/ontologies;
- search specifications;
- use cases;
- user flows.
Content Strategy = what should exist and why.
Information Architecture = how the information space is organized/labeled/navigated/searched.
Keyword vs Semantic Search
Keyword search relies primarily on specified terms.
Semantic search uses meaning/context/relationships so conceptually related information can be found even when exact wording differs.
Controlled vocabulary, Metadata, thesauri and ontologies support richer retrieval.
Precision vs Recall preview
- Precision: of what was retrieved, how much was relevant?
- Recall: of everything relevant that existed, how much was retrieved?
Returning everything can maximize recall but destroy precision. Returning one perfect result may have great precision but terrible recall if many relevant items were missed.
Structured/unstructured integration
A document about Customer X becomes more valuable when its Metadata connects consistently to the same enterprise Customer concept used in structured systems. Chapter 9 therefore connects strongly to Metadata, Reference Data, Modeling and Integration.
Source: IA/search sections and pp. 323–327 for retrieval metrics.