What puts the “smart” in the term “smart content”? Various things. Examples include:

• A strategic approach to developing and managing content as a business asset.
• Efficient use of content processes, people, and technology.
• Content that scale.
• Content designed for automation, including content components.
• Content appropriately structured for retrieval and reuse.
• Personalized content that deliver value for customers and potential customers: the right content delivered to the right person at the right time regardless of device.

Smart content moves away from humans needing to touch every piece of content at every instance of use. Instead, smart content moves toward an advanced creation and publishing process that leans on data and metadata that coordinates content efforts across departments and that makes smart use of technology.

The following scenario illustrates the use of smart content in DocFactory.

Suunto, a company that manufactures and markets sports watches, dive computers, compasses and precision instruments need to create, localize in 27 languages, manage and publish technical information for all their products, including variations of the products. Suunto also needs to create, localize in 19 languages, manage and distribute product UI-strings in the software build process, UI-strings, also re-used in the technical information.

To reach their goal, Suunto make the content smart to facilitate automatic builds and content filtering by:

• Creating structured component-based content.
• Adding semantic metadata clearly identifying what piece of content is appropriate in which situation.
• Creating rules that identify each product configuration.
• Using variables for key sequences in API-calls delivering the correct content at the time of publication or localization.
• Using DocFactory to publish and deliver the content on demand based on the configuration rules.

With smart content Suunto are saving through reduced translation and gaining optimized publishing and delivering processes. The smart content is used when publishing technical manuals as well as being an integral part of the automated software build process.

So what is smart content? Simply put, smart content is content, which is not limited to one purpose, technology or output. Content that is structurally rich and semantically aware, and is therefore discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable.

Smart Content, Part 2