technology.pitt.edu wins ACM Best in Category award
I just found out that the Technology site—the site that was my baby, with all the tears and aspirations that that implies—just won an award...
Best Of Category: Computing Services Public Web Site from the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) User Group for University and College Computing Services
I am thrilled that the site is being recognized. It was one of the first sites I tackeled when I joined the University of Pittsburgh Web Team. Both the team and the client were excited about the new ideas I brought to the site's archtecture and thought it might get some notice.
The site was for the University's internal IT group. When I started sorting through their content, it became clear to me that they were talking to a number of different audiences: Students, Staff, Faculty, Guests, and Departments who were using Windows, Mac, Linux, and mobile OSs.
That's 20 different audiences that they were trying to communicate with in each page!
The worst part of it was that it was up to the user to sort through all the messages and figure out which one applied to her. Which was, of course, leading to the usual problems of 'stupid' users and (sometimes) surly, RTFM tech support (this is all making me want to watch The IT Crowd....)
But, if we just asked the user what relationship they had with the University and what kind of OS they used, we could take a lot of that work of their shoulders and help them find the right information quickly. And thus a site was born.
The system still has all the content that was in the original site. If a person comes to a page that has multiple audiences, he is prompted to choose his relationship and OS—information that is retained for the remainder of the session but can be changed—and for the rest of his visit the site is tailored for him.
This project has come back into my mind at an interesting time. I have accepted a position at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute where I will be looking at ways to use Semantic Web technologies in Content Management Systems.
I wonder, how many ontologies have an intended audience kind of property? That kind of metadata could certainly be useful for university computing services sites. For instance, if Blackboard and other educational software producers provided their documents with metadata for university role and OS, university sites could pull that instructional content directly and offer it to the correct users... instead of uploading it in a dump of Word docs and pdfs for users to sort through like they do today. Something to think on...
