Nice preso, Aaron B.! And thanks for sharing UX Methods, Larry S.. François S., UX Methods is a “CMS” driven entirely from RDF (using Jekyll-RDF as a generator—I did a write up on that a while back you can find here). That project has actually lent some perspective on how I think about data and content-as-data: my current hypothesis is that there’s a middle ground between relational and graph content/data that might be best summed up as “narrative.” It’s the humans-in-all-their-linguistic-eccentricity place where a specific linear order of content is meaning-rich. It can be represented in graph (or relational) structures, but doing that in, say, Protégé, is in effect fighting with the tool (and the data format). That’s where I think something like Sanity—or even just simple Markdown—lends itself to how we frame this kind of content to begin with. Then a well structured model (as Carrie and Mike so brilliantly lay out) helps to translate that into something useful that can be mixed with relational and graph data. All of which is no surprise to you all, of course — I realize I’m preaching the choir! I mention it only as background and context for UX Methods. At the end of the day, that project’s biggest weakness, I think, is that it’s not easy enough to update, evolve, and add to. It’s not hard, but it’s not easy enough. The next iteration of that (maybe soon??) will be based on Sanity (for narrative content), and backed by an ontology in (probably) Fuseki to coordinate the “semantic reasoning” step that’s currently being handled by a couple shell scripts that have to be run manually.
I’ll second that this is great to hear. The KGC site could be an excellent place to showcase elements of what can be done with forward thinking ideas of content as communication (vs. content as “pages” — akin to the perils of the “w” word Aaron mentions). I’ll also second Aaron B.’s needs-based activities. As a couple reference points, Carrie Hane and Mike Atherton’s Designing Connected Content lays out a very lucid structured content design process—and uses “designing a conference website” example throughout (which feels like cheating … but I don’t think it is). The second edition of Coleen Jones’s Clout/The Content Advantage also has some truly inspired approaches for designing from content/content need out (i.e. as opposed to fetishizing over tech). And with that said (and meant!), here’s some fetishization over tech: I’ve been working with a client in the healthcare space since the beginning of the year and one of the things we’ve done is build a structured content pilot on the Sanity headless CMS. I did some research on a few of the other options available, and Sanity ended up with a lot to recommend itself. (They also recently raised $39M for their series B, so I’m even less worried about them going up in smoke any time soon). The things I like about it:
a display agnostic open source encoded content API
complete control over the structure of content
a customizable React-base open source editor
a growing collection of plugins
well supported integrations with other CMSs, including static site generators (we’re using Gatsby)
The challenges:
There’s a new query language to learn (GROQ — though I’m able to find a lot of similarities to SPARQL, so it’s not hard to get started)
It’s all React-based. One can install and run it without knowing React, but you’d want to get into the code to take advantage of the places Sanity really shines. That said, React’s not that hard to learn—and all that knowledge spills over to what one can then do on the front end.
Sanity (the company) hosts the API, so for high volume sites (or lots of editors), there are fees involved. Their free tier is super generous, though, and even once you start to get into supporting multiple contributors (editors), their pricing model is quite reasonable. AND THEN! There are all the other things I haven’t played with yet, but am itching to get into:
supporting user submitted content (which could play into an “events” focus for KGC),
using semantic content structure to support rich, expressive JSON-LD on the front end, and
using feedback loops between well structured content and Google Analytics/Tag Manager to generate “Content Intelligence” (in Colleen Jones’s phrasing).
</ TechFetishization > All that said, the way in which KGC would like the site to support community activities may present some use cases/needs that could require a closer evaluation of the other options available. I’m clearly really enjoying Sanity at the moment, but one size never does fit all. Larry S., I believe you’ve dabbled in Sanity a bit yourself, no? I’d be interested to hear your take. (No, the “Sanity” jokes never get old). Hope that helps — and happy to chat more!
Thanks for the note, Matei C. — I’m so glad to hear you found that useful. It’s been handy for me in helping to explain to others how the pieces fit together (and so much more effective that just waving my hands around, which somehow was the alternative). Putting it together forced me to think a bit more systematically about the pieces, as well; I’d expect you’d find similar value in doing something like this for your projects.
Hey Book Club Colleagues — Turns out I’m up to my eyeballs in client work for the rest of Q1 and am not going to be able to participate in this project anywhere near what I had hoped, but I do want to share an update to the UX Methods Knowledge Graph project I started last year while we were reading SWWO. I suspect it has some overlap with the Book Club Ontology project and may spark some ideas—either for approaches to try … or perhaps for one to avoid:
Thanks Ellie! — and thanks so much for all the wrangling you do for this group. I hope you have a great holiday, too!
I also don’t think I’ll be able to make tonight’s call, but would love to participate in some capacity (maybe in thinking about how we want to use this as an application). Per Ellie Y.’s excellent suggestion, I’ve added a table at the end of the doc linked above for participants— Jereme Mongeon and Matei C., please feel free to add your info! (And everyone, please do feel free to revise/add/modify columns/headings as you see fit!)
Absolutely! (And lol — masochism is definitley a component!)
Lowering the barrier both to consumption of content and collaboration is definitely something I’m interested in with this project (the clip I shared). I don’t quite have this wired up yet, but I’m imagining a way for non-technical people to contribute that basically embeds a form (could even be Google Forms, to start), that captures content in the form of structured data, then queues it in an ETL pipeline for curation:
Context: all of the content in this model is drawn from a KG (built in Protégé)
