Claudia Urschbach

Senior Information Architect, BBC

Claudia Urschbach has been involved with Content Management Systems since 1999. She is now leading the Information Architecture team within the BBC New Media’s content management department (“Content Management Culture”). The department is providing a Content Management System to produce the content for a majority of bbc.co.uk sites, adhering to structured content management principles; notably atomised content described with controlled vocabularies.

Before joining the BBC in January 2007 Claudia was working at MIVA Media as Business Analyst, mostly redefining content object models and content & client management processes. Before moving to the UK Claudia was the User Experience Lead in the internet department of Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich.

BBC

The BBC is a unique institution, owned by the British people and independent of political and commercial interests.

The BBC's purpose - largely unchanged in 80 years - is to enrich the life of every person in the UK with programmes that inform, educate and entertain.

Presentation

Thursday, November 8^th: 10.30 - 12.00

Track: User-centred Design

Challenges of creating a flexible Content Object Model

The presentation will give an overview over common problems when working with, creating or implementing a flexible content object model (COM). The following topics will be addressed:

• Introduction
  What is a content object model (COM)? Who is usually involved in creating & managing a COM?
• Benefits of a flexible COM
  Flexible COMs are required when different groups/departments/organisations use the same CMS and need to share, exchange and re-use content between them – though their content is of different type, presented in different formats & styles and published on different platforms. A flexible COM can provide the needed ‘common ground’ and offer users a wider range of possibilities around content creation.
• Challenge 1: Managing a COM – Example Protégé
  Managing a flexible COM is a problem. Keeping track of the differences between objects and creating flexible solutions for content exchange and re-use is difficult to do with simple schemas or documentation. Protégé empowers information architects to create, prototype, document and manage a COM with minimal technical involvement. The COM is stored in a semantically defined format (OWL) rather than Word, Excel or XML files only.
• Challenge 2: Communicating about a COM
  Transparency is a general problem when working with a COM. A flexible COM very often ends up being a complex semantic construct of properties and objects with a range of possible relations between them. In order to be able to develop a new or enhance an existing COM it is crucial to have a visualised version of the COM. When directly working with clients it can be beneficial to also set the individual parts of the COM in relation to applied business rules.
• Challenge 3: Designing a user-friendly CMS-UI
  When creating a flexible COM make sure you employ the best interaction designers you can find. A flexible COM means a lot of things are possible. It also means there is a big chance you confuse your users. A CMS with a flexible COM allows users to create a variety of content in a structure accessible and shared by others. The downside of this means user journeys for creating a simple object can become quite long, they are likely to include a vast amount of optional fields and steps.

Download

• cmf2007 Slides: Challenges of creating a flexible Content Object Model