Using Variables To Hold Metadata

What is Metadata?

Metadata is "data about data" or more precisely, keywords or descriptors about your content that can be used to manage and search for content. Using metadata will help you find the content you need quickly.

For example, you may want to be able to locate Topics that pertain to:

• A particular type of product (consumer, industrial, finance).
• A particular type of communication (marketing communications, technical publications, training material).
• A particular geographic location (USA, UK, Germany, Australia).
• A particular market (government, healthcare, aerospace).
• A particular customer.

There are several ways to apply metadata in Author-it including:

• Using meaningful naming conventions for your folders
• Using meaningful naming conventions for your object descriptions
• Applying specific templates to categories of information (for example, applying a "Procedure" template to procedures).

  and

• Assigning values to Author-it objects using variables.

This article discusses attaching metadata to objects by using and assigning variables.

Let's look at a scenario.

We create documentation for five different products, for three different customers, in eighteen countries, and supporting two different platforms.

We can create four variables:

1. <Product>,
2. <Customer>,
3. <Country> and
4. <Platform>

   Tip: List of Values type variables are ideal as we have a limited number of values, and our authors must choose from a predefined list. If we had an infinite number of values, we'd use Text variables.

When we want to tag an object as being associated with a particular product, we attach the variable to the object by assigning a particular product name as the value of that variable. When we want to tag an object as being associated with a particular customer, we attach the variable to the object by assigning a particular customer name as the value of that variable. And so on...

We can conceivably have several different variables that we could assign to objects, each with a list of values. For example, we can create a variable that assigned a product name to the object, one that assigned the customer name, one that assigned the country, and another that assigned the platform.

This sort of metadata tagging comes in handy when we want to locate objects that meet certain criteria. For example, we might want to find:

• All Topics associated with the ABC Company,
• All Topics about the XYZ product that are associated with the ABC Company,

  -or-

• All Topics about the XYZ product that are associated with the ABC Company, and supported on Unix.

If we've assigned variables to our objects, any of these searches are easy using Author-it's Search capability.

To find objects that meet our first criteria, we'd search for the string <Customer>=ABC Company.

To find those that meet our second criteria, we'd use the boolean search capability and search for the string <Customer>=ABC Company + <Product>=XYZ. And to find those that meet our third set of criteria, we'd use the search string <Customer>=ABC Company + <Product>=XYZ + <Platform>=Unix.

By including the <Variable> name in the search string as well as the value we are looking for, we'll only return objects where the value has been defined as a variable assignment.

If we were to only enter the value, the results would return all objects containing that string. For example, the word "Unix" might appear in a Topic that isn't tagged with the variable <Platform> and with the value of "Unix", yet it would be returned in a search for that metadata value as the string would be found.

Important: The key to the power of metadata variables is that the values can be assigned to any object in your Author-it Library. The actual placeholder does not need to appear anywhere in the text of the object. This enables you to apply metadata to any object and means the value does not need to be used in the publishable content.