Dynamic navigation and content surfacing

Providing relevant content, dynamically, to your users

Content-focused websites are those which regularly generate topical content, such as on-line newspapers, blogs, membership society sites or public information portals.  In these scenarios the most recent content will of course dominate the front page, but providing intelligent access to the potentially vast archive of past, but potentially extremely valuable, articles is a challenge.

The Semaphore Open Semantic Platform can help solve this issue.

Ontologies provides a new navigation model

An ontology provides a highly flexible alternative to the standard site navigation components.   While the core structure might include a standard parent-child tree structure, it is not limited to just this.  In an ontology:

• A topic can belong to several parents (drill up)
• A topic can be associated with other topics across the model (drill across)
• A topic can have a mass of signpost terms to help users find it.

Often a large site has been built over many years and so restructuring the base content is a formidable task.

Semaphore enables:

• All content to be "tagged" accurately and consistently with terms from the ontology.
• The navigation to reference these tags, but is abstracted from the pages themselves - the links between topics shown at run-time with reference to the ontology.

The components of Semaphore that enable dynamic navigation

• The Ontology Manager models the navigation structures and holds any attributes required to tailor the application.
• The Classification Server applies the term's meta data to the pages throughout the site.
• The Semantic Enhancement Server provides a reference to the ontology that can scale to the highest query-per-second rates.

Increase 'dwell time' by providing relevant content

A great deal of effort and money is spent attracting people to the site, but once they are there you need to convert them.   Agencies talk about 'stickier pages' and 'increased dwell time' - making the content as relevant as possible to the reader so they stay and explore.

Semaphore can drive this process by allowing the content management system to dynamically assemble related articles that surround the main topic.

Often the user's journey to your site starts on a search engine.  The landing page is rarely the site homepage, in fact it could be anywhere depending on their original search term.

It's possible to capture that search term, and a query to the Semantic Enhancement Server will return likely primary and related topics held in the ontology - a model you have developed and so can help take the user journey where you want it to. Generating sections of the page on the fly by pulling in ontology related topics should provide a result that stuns the user by its relevance to their search.