Role of structured content and semantic AI in powering guided experiences

RWS’ Tridion, with six of its partners, recently convened in Stockholm for the Tridion partner summit. They shared their rich expertise and experience in powering guided experiences through structured content and semantic AI. Eric Tengstrand from Etteplan was the moderator for the event and the panel included Ginika Ibeagha from RWS’ Tridion team along with Tridion partner representatives: Toni Ressaire from Technically Write It, Bruno Fraissinede from Fluid Topics, Joe Girling from Congility, Wouter Maagdenberg from TXTOmedia, Vangelis Lympouridis, and Eren Aksu from Deloitte Digital. 

The panel agrees that structured content and semantic AI are essential for employees and customers of an organization to reduce heavy reliance on the knowledge and expertise of a select few employees. It enables continuity because when such few employees are unavailable, employees at work struggle to find relevant information or find solutions to any issues that may arise. 

Bridging breaks between information flow through structured content and semantic AI 

The panel discussed the various gaps or breaks in capturing tribal knowledge, i.e., when sharing the information between the employees who created it with other on-premise employees (who may be in different departments), field service employees, and subject matter experts. Structured content allows us to bridge such gaps (even in metaverse) to deliver relevant information. 

At present, in most businesses, it is primarily a one-way flow where information is flowing from within the organization to the on-field employees, but technology is emerging further to enable the flow of information back from on-field employees to the organization. E.g., there can be certain forms with certain fields that on-field employees can capture in real-time and send back to the system. 

The information collected can be auto-smart tagged to place it in the relevant knowledge graph with the correct taxonomy so that others can easily find and use it in the future. This can be enabled through structured content right at the outset. 

Another area where there is a gap or break is when an author creates content, there is no feedback, e.g., how many people read it or liked it. With structured content, this can be enabled, there is technology/analytics to enable it, but the process is sometimes lacking. 

This is all very relevant from the point of view of managing the maintenance team/work. Eren mentioned that the future of maintenance is in a network of technologies where it is: 

• powered through augmented reality on the job, 
• by virtual reality prior to the job, 
• connected by technologies such as 4G, 5G, or Wi-Fi 
• structured content populating it fully 
• sending/receiving smart tagged data using semantic AI to make it contextually relevant 

The gap exists today because many companies view these as fragmented technologies, whereas these are all part of the same solution. 

How can safety and standards be built into information creation across guided experiences technologies such as metaverse? 

User-centric approach (to understand and model users) 

Organizations start to build infrastructure where it combines content-centric and user-centric. And this is the biggest hurdle. Only a minority of organizations are willing to put the user at the center of the data model. User personas need to be defined, which can be modeled well instead of looking at individual users. And based on these, build safety and standards. 

Governance structure at the top management 

Ginika mentioned governance being a hurdle many times in implementing safety and standards. He said the project usually starts from an idea stage, and everyone is excited during the initial step. However, as the investment needs increase, the decisions for budget approvals move to top management and the project’s progress begins to slow down or, even worse, gets postponed as the focus is on being profitable today. 

Structured content 

Eren mentioned that having structured content right at the outset would resolve the issues that companies could face later in terms of inculcating safety and standards. 

Role of Tridion in delivering the content through these new delivery mediums such as AR, MR, and VR 

Ginika mentioned that content would not just be distributed or delivered through documents as these new technologies are gaining adoption. And that is already happening through Tridion, whether headless delivery or DXD. Content, without doubt, is being consumed across different channels, such as on AR, on a website, or an app through a handheld device, for several reasons. 

Tridion acknowledges the various preferences and combines them with different existing and emerging technologies. It is therefore building infrastructure and structuring content in a future-proof way, ready to cater to such diverse needs of today and tomorrow. Tridion ensures that structured content can be moved anywhere, to anyone, on any device and can receive content/feedback back into the CMS. 

Role of structured content & semantic AI in automation 

Bruno mentioned that this requires sophisticated data modeling, DITA and/or simple tagging won’t suffice. One such sophisticated data model is RDF (semantic web standard). He mentioned that the craft database had outperformed all other databases (not in terms of performance) 

Craft databases are capable of performing multiple tasks at the same time, such as ingesting DITA content, unstructured content, and relational content. It is a unified data model with knowledge graphs, machine learning, and rules engine. It delivers an automation – question-answer engine, which is 80-85% efficient and will need further training to make it more efficient. He further explained it with an example of Hitachi text corpus. 

Use cases and future of guided experiences

In closing remarks, Eren mentioned that all these guided experiences technologies are fragmented today. And although these are very effective independently, we are at this point (starting in 2022) beginning to witness efforts to bring all these technologies together (this where structured content and semantic AI becomes critical). 

We are witnessing pilots (where these technologies are coming together) draw the future of maintenance, learning, etc. These horizontal solutions can be deployed across different industries: renewables, oil and gas, chemicals, defense, etc. 

With their vast expertise and experience, Tridion and its partners will continue collaborating rigorously to shape and deliver the best futuristic guided experiences. 

Highlights: Content Language Strategy & Content Strategy Planning 

For more details and expert insights, listen to the complete recording.