How metadata could be the next big boost for publishing

Metadata can provide publishers with valuable insight into how audiences consume their content, as well as help them identify strong connections between stories.

In the latest round of funding from the Knight Foundation's Prototype fund, two projects focusing on metadata received $35,000 (£22,000) and professional mentorship to help reach their objectives.

Contextly

One is Contextly, a company that acts as an engagement service for publishers. Co-founder Ryan Singel, who previously wrote for Wired, said the project aims to "get people deeper into a publication" by recommending more personalised stories.

Contextly will analyse a story's metadata, like the author or publishing date, and find keywords from the article body that enable computers to understand the meaning and structure of the published information.

Publishers should be at the centre of their community in lots of different waysRyan Singel, Contextly

Each article's HTML code contains individual tags that make it unique, but creating these tags can sometimes be a complicated process for publishers.

Over the next four months, Contextly plans to simplify the process of adding metadata to stories by developing what Singel calls a "near real-time writing interface".

This would provide useful information to writers as they are doing their work by identifying when they have added a significantly new chunk of text.

"Showing new possible metadata candidates in a panel on the side, while a writer is trying to craft a perfect sentence, could just be distracting," Singel said, so one of the challenges they face is "developing a way of making metadata suggestions a continuous process that runs in the background".

The platform will have an open-source structure, allowing publishers to build on it by bringing forward their own contribution.

Contextly recently developed a Follow This Story button that publishers can embed into individual articles, which enables readers to sign up and receive updates from a story via e-mail. They are also sent the Backstory, a timeline of older articles that provide relevant context for a current story.

Singel pointed out that the platform will be useful for journalists, as often when writing a story, they are not necessarily aware their publication has written about that topic before and they are deprived of rich content that would otherwise bolster the quality of their writing.

According to Singel, the focus should be on making existing systems smarter and more useful for readers. Contextly's metadata-focused interface suits a wide range of stories, from breaking news to long-term interest topics in sports, science or technology.

"The publishing industry has made use of metadata tags for a long time, but it needs to make sure the content is not only found by Facebook," Singel said.

Instead, news outlets should think of their job as more than breaking news and towards being "at the centre of their community in lots of different ways".

Chicago Public Media

The other project comes from Chicago Public Media in aiming to build a tool that uses metadata to better visualise networks.

We want our project to be an interface where connecting those relationships is easily achievedBrendan Metzger, Chicago Public Media

Radio station WBEZ, a subsidiary of Chicago Public Media, has already been toying with the idea in the project Sound Opinions, a music website linking artists, albums and labels.

"It was made so that you could literally draw a line from an artist to an album and it would start rendering things such as reviews of that album," Brendan Metzger, a developer working on the prototype, told Journalism.co.uk

The main issue with visualising data is the high learning curve, he said, particularly for people responsible of creating relationships and networks, such as editors.

"We want our project to be an interface where connecting those relationships is easily achieved," he added.

In terms of how deep the connections between elements could run, Metzger said an infinite number of tags could be created.

He added that each text paragraph can become a tag "depending on how many words you want to highlight".

There is also a possibility of implementing a function where audiences can solicit data, particularly if they are already knowledgeable in a particular field, and the prototype could be expanded into areas such as politics and campaign finance.

"I think this interface has more benefit to the people consuming the content than those setting it up and playing with it," Metzger concluded.

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