Marianne has been involved with structured content since the days of SGML. She strives to help people understand the true business value of markup languages (e.g., DITA and other types of XML) in an organization’s content strategy. Marianne is the VP of Marketing at Data Conversion Laboratory, an organization who has helped businesses structure content and data since 1981.

Content Structure 101: The Building Blocks for Innovation and Digital Transformation

Content structure is THE foundation for innovation and digital transformation. Too often conversations around content structure quickly become a sea of acronyms that are intimidating to understand, particularly for early career professionals or folks who simply don’t have the bandwidth to keep up to date with technology and related jargon. This presentation breaks down the basics of content structure in a way that’s digestible for all backgrounds and demonstrates the business benefits.

Content comes in many different forms—static image-based PDFs, spreadsheets, websites (in many languages), and even boxes of old files—yet it can all be mined, structured, and enriched to create valuable resources for modern businesses and today’s digital-first consumers. “Digital transformation” is often defined as the process of using digital technologies to create or optimize business processes to improve company and customer experience and meet changing customer demand and market requirements.

In this session attendees will learn:

• Key concepts and definitions of “structured content”
• How XML provides real business benefits
• Ways they can implement structured content to improve workflows and content interchange