Content modelling was the meat of several years of my work at the BBC. The Content Management Culture project was aiming to structure the content in the CMS to enable cross-platform publishing and re-use of content. That meant the content needed to be modelled i.e. broken down into predictable, addressable components.

Over the years we modelled content across local news, children’s TV, comedy and drama. We conducted huge content audits, hunting for patterns in the data. I have strangely fond memories of the time that Helen Lippell & I spent, largely alone, in the office between Xmas and New Year, trawling through Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish content. We scared ourselves with a bleeding (singing?) Celtic head from some of the children’s content.

From the audits we designed a set of content types and their related templates that all the content should be fitted into, possibly a little tweaking. Our early models turned out to be more detailed than necessary. Cross platform publishing was slow to fruition, and the journalists appetite for reusing each other’s content was less than their management teams had hoped. At the coal face the teams were primarily concerned with ease of content creation and complex content types got in the way. Simple, flexible content types always won out.

Eventually the management of the various models became too complicated and we needed to developed the COM tool.