A look at the challenges and benefits of delivering unified content within the public sector. Presentation originally given by Matt J (@mhj_work) at UK GovCamp 2011

1. The Challenges of Unified Content GovCamp 2011 Matt Johnson, Eduserv

2. In the beginning was the hand-crafted Web 1994: HTML 2 (draft), browser-specific tags First UK (non-academic) websites

3. We started reusing common content… 1995: Server Side Includes gain traction 1996: Server-side scripting (including ASP)

4. …and separating content and presentation 1997: CSS v1 published by W3C Very limited browser support (Netscape 3)

5. Then the rise of the CMS… 2002: Adoption of custom CMS within government Basic page-based functionality

6. …and more content-presentation separation 2009: Content-based CMS widely available Web-standards support (RDF, HTML5, CSS3)

7. Public sector websites at the start of 2011 Predominantly CMS-driven (both CoTS and OSS) Page-based content editing Hierarchical Information Architecture Accessible (mostly), but not always usable Growing problem of content archiving / “findability” Content is mostly held within departmental websites RSS (and now RDF) offer a partial sharing solution DirectGov an attempt to centralise some content Is there an alternative approach?

8. One concept: Unified Content Platform One store of information Content + Metadata Workflow and versioning Many delivery endpoints Websites & CMS integration RESTful API with RDF / XML outputs

9. The benefits of unified content… True separation of content and presentation/delivery Content authors do not determine URIs Web teams define site structure and appearance Dynamic site architecture Content is delivered based on associated metadata Content can appear in multiple places Content reuse Content is open and accessible Machine-readability (almost) out-of-the-box

10. …and the drawbacks Content authoring is different Users are used to thinking in pages, not articles… …and don’t like the lack of control… …hence the demand for in-context visual previews Multi-tenancy complexities Workflow integration with shared content Security and permissions need standardisation Common templates & vocabularies are needed Requires replacement of existing systems

11. So how about a Unified Data Platform… Shared Platform Full CMS interface Data Store Dept .. CMS Dept A CMS Dept B CMS 3rd party Content Editor API Simple interface Author Author Author Users Users Unified Data Platform

12. …offering the possibilities of a hybrid model Gives the best of both worlds Traditional structures for regular website content Metadata driven structures for data collections Ease of integration With existing CMS / content services Could build on the Data.gov.uk model (Relatively) simple to deliver Most of this already exists Provides a platform for transparency

13. Finally, some things to think about Is truly “unified” content desirable… …do public sector want and/or need to share content? If so, how much is that worth (effort, money)? How much appetite is there for standardisation… Different for content and data? …are sector-wide content templates a possibility? Can we agree on standard APIs / interfaces? Who are the trailblazers?

14. Questions? Matt Johnson Head of Research email: Matt.Johnson@eduserv.org.uk twitter: @mhj_work web: http://labs.eduserv.org.uk/