Government Open and Structured Content Models Are Here!

Smartphones, tablets, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, not to mention your agency’s desktop website, are all clamoring for information, but sliced and diced in different ways.

How can you make your content adaptive for efficient delivery to all of these mediums?

Structured content and open content models can help you create content that is platform-agnostic, format-free, and device-independent.

We’ve created two open and structured content models that we want you to use and adapt. These content models were created to help government agencies easily publish content in multiple forms and on multiple platforms by a cross-agency working group sponsored by the General Service Administration’s Digital Services Innovation Center.

The cross-agency working group created content models for “articles” and “events“–two commonly used content types on government websites. They define a core set of metadata elements for these two content types that may be supplemented for agency-specific use.

More importantly, you can comment and submit pull requests to help us change these models.

What’s Next?

Join us Wednesday, May 14th for the first webinar in our series “What Structured Content Can Do For You,” which will focus on the Article Content Model. Members of the working group will explain:

• what structured content is,
• show you what structured content models can do for you,
• walk you through the article model and show you how to use it.

In June, we’ll have a webinar that will highlight the Event Content Model.

Over the coming months, the working group plans to:

1. Create additional content models. Give us your suggestion for the next content model on the discussion board.
2. Host a hands-on content model development workshop in early Fall.
3. Produce use case studies and tools for development such as new code, metadata mapping and implementation strategies.

We want to foster a community of individuals and groups who are interested and wish to participate in this effort. To that end, the content models are now available on GitHub with a discussion platform for questions, comments, development, adaptation and implementation.

Join in the open content modeling project and help build a 21st century digital government!

Structured and Open Content Models Working Group Members:

We’ve created an editorial theme calendar to coordinate content each month around one focus. This month’s focus is the Digital Government Strategy. Check back for more articles related to this theme in May.