Semantic analysis

Automated tools to understand the meaning of web content including user generated content.

A semantic analysis service should be provided to not only extract meaning from content in order to improve the search facility, but to improve content categorisation and tagging to suggest related reading for content creators.

This service should accept the content in the request or as a URL and return a list of topics in a machine readable format (e.g. XML, JSON, etc)  The topic list should include matches to the Local Authority taxonomy as well as other topics that have been derived through natural language analysis.

Conversation

Allowing users to converse with council staff and other users about the content on the site.

It is important to provide a consistent mechanism for online conversations to happen across all Local Authority web properties.  A conversation service should be provided that ensures that any conversations (including comment streams) are:

• have consistent interfaces and facilities
• can be monitored, moderated and managed
• meet the requirements of the AUP

This service should be adopted by any Local Authority  and available to other community websites, but there should be an expectation that conversations will also happen elsewhere online.

Moderation

Making sure that user content published on the council sites is suitable.

By allowing user generated content to be published on its websites the council is open to risk of illegal, offensive or inappropriate content being distributed by its systems. Moderation services must be provided to reduce this risk while not overburdening staff or obliterating the benefits of user input by not meeting users’ responsiveness expectations.

Multiple moderation methods need to be available to cope with the different types of UGC, the subject matter and the openness of the particular forum.  These will include:

• automated profanity checking
• pre-publishing moderation
• user reporting of inappropriate content

Content creation and management tools

Making the content creation and management process simple. 

Content creation tools must be provided that suit the many different ways that content is produced, whether that is via a web browser-based editor, a mobile device or an export process from existing content production tools.

In addition, it is essential that content can be managed using tools that provide appropriate and useful interfaces and present management information in ways that are easy to consume.  Such tools will include: dashboards for content update queues, content usage information at the point of management (rather than hidden within an analytics tool), workflow integration and categorisation and linking suggestion facilities.

Content storage

Allowing access to structure content and content events via programming interfaces

All website content should held in a storage mechanism that is not just robust and reliable, but also allows for the content to be accessed and retrieved by systems other than the website.

Of course the storage mechanism should be able to manage different types of content like unstructured documents, files, images, audio, video and structured data, keeping full version histories of all content. It should also provide interfaces that can notify external systems of changes to the content it holds.

All of this should be done using standard storage technologies to avoid the content being locked into a proprietary database structure.