Torsten Machert is Senior Consultant at Congree Language Technologies. Before joining Congree, Torsten Machert was Managing Director of EasyBrowse GmbH. He specializes in the design and implementation of workflows based on SGML and XML and has industry experience in aerospace, defense, engineering and publishing. In the past few years, he has concentrated on the development of industrial processes for the production and distribution of highly effective electronic publications.

Content Quality is not an Accident – Defining and measuring KPIs for Enterprise Content Quality.

Co-presented with: Michael Mannhardt

ISO 9000 defines quality as: “Degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfills requirements.”

Can the principles of quality management be applied to natural languages and thus to the quality of content in terms of language and vocabulary? What are Key Performance Indicators for a corporate language? It’s definitely more than just a feeling expressed in phrases like: “Sounds good to me.”

In this session, attendees will learn:

• What content quality is all about.
• Which quality criteria is relevant for content quality and how to define and measure them. Measuring quality is, however, only one aspect of quality management. It is as important to be able to find quality issues and to apply the right means to fix and overcome them.

Ciena’s Journey to consistent Product Documentation using Controlled Language

Co-presented with: Susanna Carlisi & Robin Melanson of Ciena

With an XML-based CMS, Ciena achieved one important goal: the content structure became consistent and independent from the author. The challenge was now to make sure that the writers use the correct language and terminology consistently across different locations and time zones. We sought a way to create high-quality information that is optimized for translation and improves the user experience.

Hiring a bevy of editors is not the answer for everyone! At Ciena, we learned to leverage our style guide and terminology throughout the writing process. Following a similar process, you can free up editors’ time for high-level tasks.

In this session, attendees will learn:

In this session, attendees will learn Attendees will learn how Ciena is boosting the impact and reach of our terminology and style rules across multiple product lines. In this session, we will focus on Ciena’s approach towards linguistic quality and terminology, leveraging semantic elements when possible:

• Establishing goals and expectations for the project

• Defining style guides as the corporate language for Ciena

• Extracting terms as the basis for a corporate vocabulary

• Sharing lessons learned in the curation of the terminology

• Completing the Congree Authoring Server implementation
– Proof-of-concept phase
– Admin training sessions
– User training sessions