Not everything can just be searched. “Aha!” moments deliver value. Exploration leads to insights and surfaces contexts. How do you prepare your content for these user experiences? We start by sharing discovery interfaces that integrate public archives and cultural content collections. The interfaces show how taxonomies and knowledge graphs play a direct role in the UI (not just in the backend). From there, we broaden out to other domains, looking at how knowledge graphs provide focused “discovery glue” across repositories and how taxonomies can signpost insights across departments, partner organizations, and countries.
Taxonomy-managed content means clearly labeling what the content is about and what it contains, aiding how different content items relate to each other. This depends on disambiguation: making sure terms are relevant to contexts and consistently applied. A common taxonomy will allow a machine-readable identity for terms to be established. Linked data ecosystem architectures use standards-based models to create relationships across terms and content. The relationships build a picture of the information’s contexts—a knowledge graph—the glue between disparate content. A person may have different roles in different situations, so the context of the information you are linking to can be different based on their role.
One other valuable outcome of creating exploratory information spaces is motivating content owners and catalogers to improve their taxonomy tagging and metadata, because they benefit from the ability to discover new relationships and see how their information matters in the larger whole. This leads to significant improvements in the taxonomies.