Rob Hanna has dedicated his professional life to improving outcomes for teams embarking on structured authoring projects. Over the past 30 years, he has worked with many large corporations on DITA and CCMS projects to bring their teams into structure and drive operational efficiencies. He has taught metadata and taxonomies at the University of Toronto and private courses on structured authoring, DITA, and information architecture. In 2013, Rob founded Precision Content in Toronto, Canada, to build a team of writers, developers, and IAs to continue his mission to raise the bar in technical communication.

Stop Retrofitting Intelligence: How Microcontent and Semantic Metadata can Eliminate the Need for Ontology Overlays

Many organizations are trying to “AI-enable” their content by layering ontologies and knowledge graphs on top of content that was never designed for machine interpretation. It’s expensive, complex, and often compensates for upstream authoring decisions. What if intelligence didn’t need to be retrofitted? This session explores how microcontent authoring combined with rich semantic metadata and strategic linking creates inherently interpretable, machine-ready content. By embedding meaning directly into content architecture, organizations can reduce—or even eliminate—the need for heavy ontological overlays while improving search precision, AI retrieval accuracy, and human usability. Instead of adding intelligence after the fact, learn how to design it in from the start.

In this session, attendees will learn:

• Why many AI initiatives rely on overlays to compensate for weak content granularity
• How microcontent strategies create self-describing, contextually complete knowledge units
• The role of rich semantic metadata in:
• Improving search precision
• Enhancing AI retrieval accuracy
• Supporting personalization without external mapping layers
• Governance strategies for embedding meaning at authoring time
• When ontology overlays are justified—and when they introduce unnecessary complexity