I just heard Frank Gilbane define Content Management as the “management of unstructured information” at the Gilbane Content Management conference this morning. The definition is growing on me and here is why… I think there needs to be some limits on what we include when we say “content.” For example, I would not call transactions in a General Ledger system “content.” I think that the most structured we get with content is semi-structured where certain information (such as publish date, author name, and maybe even title) is structured and can be fielded or tagged. However, the body of the content (as in the beautiful prose I am writing here) is most certainly unstructured. Is the degree of structure how I decide what to call content and what to call data?

Thoughts?

Related posts:

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This entry was posted by Seth Gottlieb on Tuesday, November 30th, 2004 at 10:22 pm and is filed under commentary. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.