Why news organizations need to invest in better linking and tagging by Frédéric Filloux.
From the post:
Most media organizations are still stuck in version 1.0 of linking. When they produce content, they assign tags and links mostly to other internal content. This is done out of fear that readers would escape for good if doors were opened too wide. Assigning tags is not exact science: I recently spotted a story about the new pregnancy in the British royal family; it was tagged “demography,” as if it was some piece about Germany’s weak fertility rate.
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But there is much more to come in that field. Two factors are are at work: APIs and semantic improvements. APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) act like the receptors of a cell that exchanges chemical signals with other cells. It’s the way to connect a wide variety of content to the outside world. A story, a video, a graph can “talk” to and be read by other publications, databases, and other “organisms.” But first, it has to pass through semantic filters. From a text, the most basic tools extract sets of words and expressions such as named entities, patronyms, places.
Another higher level involves extracting meanings like “X acquired Y for Z million dollars” or “X has been appointed finance minister.” But what about a video? Some go with granular tagging systems; others, such as Ted Talks, come with multilingual transcripts that provide valuable raw material for semantic analysis. But the bulk of content remains stuck in a dumb form: minimal and most often unstructured tagging. These require complex treatments to make them “readable” by the outside world. For instance, a untranscribed video seen as interesting (say a Charlie Rose interview) will have to undergo a speech-to-text analysis to become usable. This processes requires both human curation (finding out what content is worth processing) and sophisticated technology (transcribing a speech by someone speaking super-fast or with a strong accent.)
Great piece on the value of more robust tagging by news organizations.
Rather than tagging as an after-the-fact of publication activity, tagging needs to be part of the work flow that produces content. Tagging as a step in the process of content production avoids creating a mountain of untagged content.
To what end? Well, imagine simple tagging that associates a reporter with named sources in a report. When the subject of that report comes up in the future, wouldn’t it be a time saver to whistle up all the reporters on that subject with a list of their named contacts?
Never having worked in a newspaper I can’t say but that sounds like an advantage to an outsider.
That lesson can be broadened to any company producing content. The data in the content had a point of origin, it was delivered from someone, reported by someone else, etc. Capture those relationships and track the ebb and flow of your data and not just the values it represents.
I first saw this in a tweet by Marin Dimitrov.