Content as Linked Data: Growing a spine to carry meaning at scale

Content as Linked Data: Growing a spine to carry meaning at scale Rafaëla Ellensburg, Founder & Owner at The Content Engineering Agency London 2026 #Designing4Meaning #wiad26

Content as Linked data Growing a spine to carry meaning at scale World IA Day London 2026 by Rafaëla Ellensburg

Rafaëla Ellensburg Owner The Content Engineering Agency Committed to being a: Gives lectures & workshops on: Thought leader and connector • Smart content architecture – the at the intersection of content, foundation for scalable marketing, data & technology to utilize automation, and explainable AI. content more intelligently with scalable success in the • Meaning as a strategy – content with direction, relevance and human depth. collaboration between • Scalable success – content as a strategic humans and machines. asset that understands and is understood by people and machines.

The pattern came first. 3,000 years before linked data, I Ching already built it ~1000 BCE 1701 CE 1989 ⟶ now I Ching Leibniz + Binary Berners-Lee + Semantic Web Leibniz received a diagram of the I Ching and The web was designed as a network of meaningful recognised his own binary system in it. nodes, not a filing system. A rediscovery of ancient patterns. RDF, URIs, and ontologies were built to carry • 64 hexagrams built from two elements: broken (0) and unbroken (1). • Every state connects to others through transformation rules. • Every node has properties, relationships, and context. meaning, not just to store content. The same structural logic became the foundation for modern computing: This is a linked data model! 2 states for infinite combinations The pattern persists: • 2 states: entity & relationship • infinite combinations. The architecture of meaning does not change. Only the medium does.

Two ways to organize the web. One stores content. The other carries meaning. FILE STORAGE MEANINGFUL SPINE 📁 /marketing 📄event-banner.html entity:Product#123 📄campaign-spring.html belongsTo contains 📁/product 📄product-123.html entity:Category Fresh Food 📁/support 📄faq-returns.html subjectTo entity:Allergen describedBy No entity knows what is or what it means. It only know where it lives. entity:Regulation entity:Content EU 1169/2011 nl / en / de Result? Every entity knows what it is, what it relates to, and what it means. • Duplicate content across multiple teams. • Different meanings for the same terms. • AI cannot traverse meaning here, only flatten it to a mean In any channel, language, or system. Does your content knows its own meaning or only where it is stored?

Growing the spine from the inside out. PRISMAS™ Content Architecture – Where ancient structure turns semantic web principles into enterprise practice 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 SCALE Do you have content analytics? Can you predict performance? Is planning data-driven? When content drives strategy & ROI AUTONOMY Scale is the intelligence layer that spreads through the ecosystem as a feedback loop. Is optimization automated? Can you personalize at scale? Do systems adapt without manual Where content manages itself MOTION intervention? This is where AI shows its true power. Can you publish in under 1 hour? Is content nimble between silos? What makes content portable Structured entities feed any channel without duplication or bottlenecks. SEMANTICS Can you filter by attributes? Do teams use consistent terms? Is content machine-readable? Where content becomes meaningful This is your ontology: shared meaning across systems. IDENTITY Does each asset have a unique, persistent ID? Can you find it in 30 seconds? What makes content traceable Identity is the URI layer. Without it, nothing can be linked trustworthy. REFINEMENT Is quality consistent? Are standards documented? Is ‘done’ clearly defined? How content becomes ready to use Structured content must meet a threshold before it enters the ecosystem. PRODUCTION Who creates what? Are workflows defined, sources auditable, and approval gates clear? Where content originates No spine without a known origin. Most organizations are so busy asking ‘is this content good enough?’ that they never ask: “Does this content know what it is?” (Layer 3 & 4) Intelligence Automation / AI APIs Ontology / RDF URI Quality Source

Meaning doesn’t exist in a node, file, source or thing. Meaning exists in the connections between things.

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