Glossary · 3 · Publishing SDKs and structured content
Semantic publishing
Also known as: Semantic content publishing
In publishing and information management, semantic publishing is the publication of content together with machine-readable statements about its meaning, such as metadata, classifications against a taxonomy or ontology, and links to identified entities, so that software can find, combine and interpret the content and not only display it.
- Publishing SDKs
- Technical documentation
In one sentence
Semantic publishing delivers content with machine-readable meaning (metadata, ontologies, linked data) so software can find and combine it.
Example
Each published maintenance topic carries metadata naming the product variant, component and lifecycle phase as IRIs from a product ontology, so a service portal can show exactly the topics for the machine in front of the technician.
How it applies
- Publishing SDKs: A semantic publishing pipeline keeps metadata attached to every unit of content and carries it into each output: as HTML metadata, as embedded JSON-LD, as package metadata for a content delivery service or as RDF statements. Classifications usually refer to a controlled taxonomy or an ontology and identify concepts with IRIs.
- Technical documentation: Standards for delivering technical information, such as iiRDS, apply the idea to product documentation: content is delivered with metadata about product, component, information type and lifecycle phase, so that receiving systems can filter it. See for example iiRDS InformationType.
- Developer and platform SDKs: API references, release notes and code samples published with structured metadata can be indexed by developer portals, search engines and AI assistants more reliably than plain pages.
- Knowledge graphs: Semantic publishing feeds and is fed by a knowledge graph: published content links to graph entities, and the graph links back to the content.
- Quality: The value depends on correct, maintained metadata. Wrong classifications are published as confidently as right ones; review and governance of the vocabularies are part of the process.
Semantic publishing vs. semantic markup
Semantic markup describes what a piece of text is inside the document (a step, a warning, a part number). Semantic publishing goes further: it publishes statements about the content that other systems can process, typically against shared vocabularies and with resolvable identifiers. Semantic markup is a common source for those statements but not a requirement.
Background
In 2009 David Shotton described semantic publishing for scholarly journals: web technology is used to enhance published articles semantically, by publishing their data and metadata on the web and providing interactive access to their content, which allows further services to be built on them. Tim Berners-Lee's Linked Data principles (2006) describe how such statements can be linked across the web.