RSS feedI was talking the other day about filtering or lensing content, in order to view content according to a particular combination of context, depth and field of view.
- Context is the orientation and position of the content, with respect to related content.
- Depth is the amount of focussed detail contained within the content. We’d liken this to depth in the standard model of 3D space, and typically use the zoom in and out analogy in user interfaces like Adobe PhotoShop or Microsoft Visio.
- Field of view is the scope of the content, and using our 3D model, is effectively the width and height, or area covered by the content.
Within Sytadel, our CMS product, we’ve tried to address the context problem in several ways, but the most interesting is through information spaces. A Sytadel information space is like a category, and each item of content must belong to one. However, information spaces also have security control, which is used passively during web page construction for personalisation. Information spaces are like filters/lenses, and help weave the content into the final constructed web page.
All web pages in Sytadel are constructed at request time, and can contain up to several hundred items of microcontent on some of the more complex pages. Depending on the security for the content and information spaces, we end up with a page which has been constructed specifically for this particular user and their location within the site, by combining content from various information spaces and several layers of information architecture. We say location, like with a typical web site, but because every page is completely dynamic, there’s no real notion of a page or location within the site. It is left to the information architecture to allow the user to perceive the structure of the site in their own particular way. This is real personalisation, and without bragging too much, Sytadel does this exceptionally well.
Getting back to filtering/lensing, because the technology is not currently available to make the contextual, depth and field of view decisions required for this type of personalisation, information spaces allow us to annotate the content to give the system hints. You could liken this to web search engines, where AltaVista tried to use page metadata for hints, and Google dismissed the metadata once the technology became available to act purely on the content. (I don’t like to use too many search engine examples, because Peter, our in-house pedantic search uberguru usually spends an hour explaining to we why my example is slightly incorrect and a better example would be )
We have a standard diagram we use to try to explain information spaces to our customers, which likens them to an 2D onion skin, where there are successive layers of information spaces containing content, such as Intranet, Extranet, Internet, and our page construction is like polygons of various sizes and shapes which lay over the onion as a representation of the page. An external observer looking at the site may see content from all three layers, as if peering into the onion.
In hindsight, this is a flawed analogy, because it gives information spaces a distinct layer ordering, whereas while technically possible within Sytadel, we instead use a flat separated information space model for sites which have a typical team (Intranet), organisation (Extranet), public (Internet) content split. Also, this weaving of content into the final page means that the typical end user is unaware which parts of the page come from the Intranet, Internet, Extranet, or any other information space or section of the site. With an onion, you have a pretty good idea about what each layer looks like.
Sytadel is great example of annotating content to solve the problem of personalised filters/lenses on content, and it is encouraging to see that for this and a fair number of other inherent problems with assembly and visualisation of microcontent, we’ve either solved or at least recognised the problems which weblog CMS developers are only now started to bump their heads against.
While our Sauce project has a different user base to Sytadel, the technical challenges are the same if not similar, which gives both Sauce and Sytadel a nice developmental reinforcement effect, as they gain from each other’s future development. Bring it on I say, bring it on!
(Originally posted to Synop weblog)