Issues in information modeling

In the past five years (in both the professional communication and technical writing communities), there has been much emphasis on single sourcing and content management, specifically on how to (and why you would want to) "unify" content across a documentation set, a department, or an entire organization. At the Rockley Group, we work with many organizations that are implementing single sourcing or "unified content" strategies. We start by conducting an audit of their current information products and content life cycles, followed by building information models that reflect clients' desired reuse strategy. Information modeling is critical to a unified content strategy. Information models depict the structure of information products; they show how and where elements are reused, and they include the metadata that further describes how elements are used, retrieved and tracked. Information models are the specification for a unified content strategy, but information modeling brings a new set of challenges to those creating, reviewing, and implementing the models. This paper provides a brief overview of unified content, then explores some of the issues specific to information modeling, including: teaching authors to create, read, review, and implement models; distinguishing between reusable structure and reusable content; visually representing information structure; and implementing models, specifically, understanding how writing to a model affects the writing process.