Companies often discover that in order to both save money and capitalize on their hard-won knowledge, they can no longer simply re-format the work they have already produced, item-by-item. They need a “reuse” strategy that will inform every procedure they implement in terms of design, work, content, information storage, etc.

Despite all the progress made over the last several years, most content management systems are capable of processing large volumes of unrelated and scattered content, indexing it with metadata and making it available to users via portals. This kind of content structure and history is broken down into very few levels and granularity is very rough, making any process designed to reuse such complex, hierarchical, multi-linked business-specific information almost unusable. And no platform exists that can assemble the content for further development.

Accumulated or “legacy” knowledge has to be processed, indexed, versioned, and re-archived after the fact. A task such as this is enormous and must be automated as fully as possible.

But nobody can predict, how, when or why they will need to reuse content: a great amount of flexibility is required in order to later reexamine content elements (or MRUs – Minimum Reusable Unit) in the light of business-related constraints or unforeseeable applications when it comes time to package content for future use.

What companies know full well however, is the context in which they will end up processing the content. Such information still holds a wealth of significance and potential for their organization, for it is at the very heart of their business.

If content is stored in the knowledge base according to a business-specific schema, it can rely on the semantics, the relationships and the organization of the business, which makes the content’s life cycle significantly longer.

What is a business-specific schema?

• A content Structure that is specific to an industry
• The set of business Rules and processes (assembly, verification rules, etc.)
• Business interfaces (Programming API, business-specific objects, etc.)

What are its benefits?

• Users can work on a content’s semantics
• Content interoperability is optimized
• Exchanges can be made with the ecosystem