The Role of Names in Content Management

ABSTRACT

Content management systems manage a variety of content. Synthesizing that content for a particular purpose involves calling information objects by name. Linking between information objects involves recognizing the name of one information object when it occurs in the content of another information object. One of the great benefits of XML for content management systems is that it provides the opportunity to clarify the names of things that occur in content. For instance, a movie review that contains the sentence "The Duke plays a Union colonel..." can be marked up to make it clear that the words "The Duke" are a name for the actor whose formal name is "John Wayne": "<actor name="John Wayne">The Duke</actor> plays a Union colonel..."

Different kinds of names can exist is content. They may be divided into the following categories:

• Common names

• Abstract names

• Formal names

• Local names

• Nicknames

• Ad-hoc names

Each of these types has advantages and disadvantages for content management purposes. The example given above maps a nickname ("The Duke") to a formal name ("John Wayne", a professional name regulated by the Screen Actors Guild), and placed that formal name in its proper namespace ("<actor>"). Formal names are easier to use as the basis of linking strategies because they are unambiguous.When designing markup languages it is important to provide a means to map the names that appear in content into an appropriate type of name in an appropriate namespace. You must balance the needs of content creators (who cannot map names into a namespace they do not know) with the need for synthesis and linking strategies to be able to rely on objects being named in a reliable and unambiguous fashion. To achieve this, the correct choice of naming scheme is essential.