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Ilse Jonker and Joyce van AaltenModern content projects get the best results when content strategy and conceptual meaning are considered together, and the results can really shine when long-time collaborators do the work.
Ilse Jonker and Joyce van Aalten are independent consultants who have teamed up on many content projects over the past dozen years.
Ilse focuses on content strategy and structure, and Joyce focuses on taxonomy and semantics. Together they build the scaffolding the supports their clients’ content operations.
We talked about:
- Joyce’s freelance taxonomy work and Ilse’s freelance content strategist, and their common interest in content structure and semantics
- the importance of organizations being ready for change and willing to start small when they engage a consulting team for a complex change project
- the baffling tolerance that organizations have for redundancy in their content landscape
- their approach to dealing with organizational silos
- Joyce’s content-first approach to her taxonomy work
- Ilse’s emphasis on the importance of understanding organizational culture before beginning a project
- their view of the concept of a “semantic layer”
- how they empower their clients to evangelize their work to other stakeholders
- how they collaborate around the structure and the semantics of the content projects they work on
- how Ilse’s structured-content work goes hand in hand with Joyce’s metadata work
- how taxonomies and ontologies can make tacit organizational knowledge explicit as structural artifacts
- the importance of connecting with other people
Team bio
Joyce and Ilse are experienced consultants that have been working together on a regular basis since 2012. They are both solopreneurs, and do projects of their own but also a lot of assignments together. They describe their combination as yin and yang: put them together and you’ll get a holistic, semantic view on your content and information landscape. Sometimes they bring in an additional data scientist to work with them, too.
Ilse’s bio
Ilse fell in love with the web in 1996. After graduating in Liberal Arts, specializing in New Media as it was called then, she worked several years as online project manager and pivoted slowly to strategy. Since 2006 she works as an independent content strategist and consultant. She has 25+ years of experience in helping profit, semi-public and non-profit organizations navigating digital change (website renewals, content migrations, redesigns, omnichannel programmes). She loves to coach younger content strategists, so, happy to connect on LinkedIn!
Connect with Ilse online
Joyce’s bio
Joyce van Aalten has been working on taxonomies since 2000, after she graduated in Library and Information Science. Currently she is an independent taxonomy consultant and trainer with experience in more than 50 taxonomy, thesaurus, ontologies and knowledge graphs projects. Joyce is specialized in taxonomy management tools and the possibilities of metadata/taxonomy within information management systems. She frequently shares her knowledge via workshops, articles and talks at conferences, like the Taxonomy Boot Camps. She is also co-author on Taxonomies: Practical Approaches to Developing and Managing Vocabularies for Digital Information.
Connect with Joyce online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 199. Content practice and semantic practice often go hand in hand. In their long-time consulting partnership, Ilse Jonger and Joyce van Aalten have taken collaboration around content structure and semantic meaning to new heights. Whether they’re spanning organizational silos, coaching clients on how to evangelize their work to other stakeholders, or implementing a change-management strategy, their common interest in structure always ties their work together.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 199 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show Joyce van Aalten and Ilse Jonker. They’re based here in the Netherlands where I currently live. They’re long-time independent consultants. Joyce is a freelance taxonomy consultant, and Ilse is an independent and freelance content strategist. So welcome to the show. Joyce, tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re doing these days.
Joyce:
Thanks, Larry, and thanks for having us at the show. I’ve been working on taxonomies since 2000, I think. I graduated in library and information science, and as you already mentioned, currently I work as an independent taxonomy consultant. I’m doing all kind of taxonomy, thesaurus, knowledge graph, ontology projects, and I think I’ve seen more than 50 companies in the past 20 years.
Joyce:
How I rolled in this: I love the combination of structure on one side and semantics on the other side. And I think that all started… I’ll share a little secret… When I was a child and I had my own little library. With all the books that I had, I put labels in it so friends could come over to me, to my library. So, I think structuring and semantics is in my DNA.
Joyce:
These days I still like to talk about taxonomies, also at birthday parties, but then people wander off to the bar, getting another drink. That’s why these days I share my knowledge via presentations, for instance at the Taxonomy Bootcamp, but also with customers.
Larry:
Great. I hope there’s childhood pictures of your library. I would love to see that.
Joyce:
I still have some books actually here with all the labels in it. That’s the only heritage of the library.
Larry:
Nice. And Ilse, tell the folks a little bit more about your work these days.
Ilse:
Hi, Larry. Thanks for having us, and congratulations with this enormous number of podcasts. 199, whoa, it’s an honor. I’m a freelance content strategist. I work in independent since 2006. I started out as an internet project manager after graduating in liberal arts. I specialized in new media, as it was called in 1996, we know those times. Since 2006, I work independent and I cover all aspects of the content strategy trades, managing large content change projects.
Ilse:
I love to coach younger content strategists. It’s about content modeling, content operation assessments, and it’s mostly about helping orgs through digital change. And I’m joking, say about myself I am an organizational therapist with an education practice. It’s basically all about that change.
Larry:
Nice. Just so you know, that’s a truism that comes up so often on this podcast, that we’re all really just therapists and doing our best to help people. How long have you two worked together? You’ve been a team for a while, right?
Ilse:
2012, I think?
Joyce:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had to recall what our first project was. I think it’s since 2012. Yes, indeed.
Larry:
Over the last 12 years, you’ve had a few good stories come up. You talked about when Ilse first wrote to me. She said, “Oh, we’ve seen things, man. We’ve seen things.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s ominous.” And these stories inform how you practice now.
Joyce, you had one you wanted to share about a taxonomy project, right?
Joyce:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I have a lot of stories I can share. But I think this is a nice one because the things I’ve seen in this project, it’s not at this organization solely, it’s also things I’ve seen in the other taxonomy projects. I think the story also indicates that sometimes you have to be patient to achieve something, also in working on a taxonomy.
Joyce:
Actually for this organization, I started in the pre-COVID time. A few years ago they came to me and said, “Joyce, you’re a taxonomist. We want a taxonomy. Can you help us create one?” And I was like, “OK, what do you want with it? What are your goals?” “We have these ambitions: omnichannel, personalization, reusable.” And I was like, “Okay, yeah.” I’m a taxonomist, I have my own library, so I was, “Okay, let’s go for it.”
Joyce:
We started working on it. COVID hit this organization very hard, so it was a little bit quiet for a while. And then I think two, three years ago they came back to me with again the same ambitions and goals. I also said here now, “This is not a taxonomy-only project. You have to look at your content as well.”
Joyce:
So, Ilse came in at the project. But also, in the first conversations that we had, there were still these ambitions, but we also noticed that this organization was not really ready for it yet. So, we described some prerequisites that we said, “You have to get your goals more clear. But also, we need a team. We need the right people, but we also need technology.”
Joyce:
They were still working in a content management system that wasn’t ready for these ambitions and goals yet. So, once again, we did a step back and then a few months later they came back and said, “Whoa, now we are going to move to a new content management system, and it won’t replace only one content repository, it will replace two.” That was when we got excited.
Joyce:
And we see that a new content management system or any other system can be the trigger for having a taxonomy, but also a content model or whatever you need in semantic approach as a trigger point for that. We started working on that. And then the taxonomy, I also found out very quickly that it’s good to start small. These ambitions are high and I think then for taxonomy you would like to create a huge, enormous beast of taxonomy, but that won’t work.
Joyce:
So, we started small over there. I started with a small taxonomy for one content management system for that content repository. And now it’s time that that taxonomy will grow in terms of more concepts, more relationships or other content repositories to cover in that sense. And that is something that I’ve seen also at other companies. That’s why I introduced the term the MVT, the minimal viable taxonomy, so where you start small and sometimes you just have to be patience, sit back for a while and let it grow.
Larry:
Nice. On that project, I’m curious, Ilse, were you working together as that was unfolding? Because you mentioned the CMS and some other content stuff. Were you involved at that point in that project, Ilse?
Ilse:
Like Joyce said, when the trigger was there. There can be a low period, there’s no change. Then there is one change, we go headless, we have a new CMS, and then she got me in. Joyce first worked with another content strategist. We were in this org a couple of years to accompany this change.
Ilse:
But we do not all projects together, but there’s always a point when one starts in the project and then the point where they’re like, “Oh. No, I need Joyce.” Because we are like a sort yin and yang. We don’t both structure. Joyce, when she makes a taxonomy, it’s a way of structuring concepts. And when I’m content modeling, I’m also structuring. That’s our common denominator, if you will. There are projects we do separately.
Joyce:
Yes. But it’s nice, because we both work as solopreneurs now. And it sometimes can get little bit lonely if you’re the only external consultant working, so it’s good to sometimes check in with each other. Did we see the same? Are they really going to buy that CMS or ignoring that content repository? And then we can say, yeah, you’ve seen it. Okay, okay. So, we assure each other.
Ilse:
With each other, and we can also mirror that back to an organization. I always love the moment every organization we enter that there comes a point that they ask, “Are we are bad? Is it worse with us than with other orgs?” And we say, “No. No, that’s not.”
Ilse:
We are honored that we are invited to enter this attic with all these systems and this org content and the redundancy, and they say, “Please help us look at it.” I think when I mentioned this war stories with you, Larry, we’ve seen things.
Ilse:
One thing I’m still baffled about, and I know all content practitioners are baffled about this, is the tolerance organizations have towards their own redundancy: Redundancy in information, redundancy in metadata, redundancy in business logic that lives in several places. We are often explaining water to fish and showing you have all this redundancy in your landscape. That is something we see, of course, in all these orgs. Why is this? Because it’s difficult.
Ilse:
I have a dog. And Larry, in Holland, we love regulations. When you walk a dog, there are a lot of things to think about. Do I have my bags? Do I need my dog muzzled? Where can I walk? This public org, this has a website. There is a page about your dog waste, where do you have to put it, what are the fines if you don’t do it? And there’s another a page with a lot of information about dog walking and dog waste, et cetera. These are two pages on one website about dog poop.
Ilse:
How is my dog poop information better than your dog poop information? I will tell you. One is from a communication department, another is from a service department. These are two systems. They are both online available. But when you have to choose and you have to put down one system in favor of the other, it means one department gets favored above the other.
Ilse:
That is what we see all the time, is the way organizations are structured or are financed streams back in the way the content is made or is polluted. And of course, we know all this as content practitioners and taxonomy practitioners, but we don’t always have the power to change those prerequisites. And then we come to senior management to see this and to accommodate this. Because when you have difficult policy about dog poop, then you get difficult content about dog poop.
Larry:
Yep. We talked about that, I think earlier, maybe over dinner. Anyhow. We talked about that the nature of silos. That’s what you’re getting at, is these organizational silos. The service people talk about dog poop one way and the communication people another. But I remember in that conversation that you’re not super-optimistic about ever breaking across silos, but you have other ways of dealing with this. How do you reconcile that kind of communication challenge?
Ilse:
I think breaking is not good, but we connect. You have this fairy circle, like mushrooms that we can see in the grass that are in a circle and they’re connected below. That’s what we always do. We come in and we see where’s the energy flowing and with who we can connect. I think that’s one way we do that. Don’t you think, Joyce?
Joyce:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think from a taxonomy perspective or semantic mindset, so to speak, we ignore the silos and I look at what is all this content about. Once again, I can identify that there’s content on dog poop in one silo, and in another silo it’s called not dog poop but dog shit-
Ilse:
Waste.
Joyce:
… or something. Waste. Sorry.
Larry:
It’s fine.
Joyce:
It’s called differently. That’s why we start with an audit, with an analysis of what is there and how is it called. I look from a concept-semantic perspective, and then Ilse looks from what is all the content and how is it structured and how is that. So, that’s another way of exposing. And then it’s also giving that back to the organization. Did you know that there are two, three, four, five silos where you talk about these topics?
Larry:
It seems like that is just exposing the issue often enough, or there’s probably some more work after you’ve done that. How do you strengthen those connections between what you identify, whether it’s a structural observation or conceptual observation, you’re like, okay, what do we do? How does it go from there?
Joyce:
I always start with the content. That’s the starting point, content, but also structures that are already available within the organization. Because if I start asking for, “Do you have any list, navigation structures, synonyms list, et cetera?”, that’s all a lot of concepts and words, terms in it. I think that that then, giving back to the organization and to the people that have to work with it, that’s the next step in that.
But Ilse, can you…?
Ilse:
Yeah. I think that’s show, don’t tell, of course always. Orgs really don’t know how much information they have stored in applications and websites, so what we always do is also do an organizational assessment: What kind of org do we have at hand? Because when you have an organization who is built merger on merger on merger, then you know that they might be merged in name, but there will be systems, and there will be procedures, and people who love their team, and that is still in your ecosystem. So, we always do an assessment: What kind of org do we have at hand?
Ilse:
And then we also adapt our way of presenting the challenges because some orgs really want math, some want whiteboard people who can energize and do that. And I think one common approach we always use is start small. Because we can design plans, we can design wonderful plans and we can present the analysis. But the most important thing is to get it to production.
Ilse:
Because we have seen a lot of plans of people about how to tackle this middle layer where all these applications live. It’s called, I think, the semantic layer or it’s about orchestration, like the field with all the content systems and information systems, the data systems. That is where we live. We try to show that basically, how they are connected.
Larry:
That new layer you just described, that semantic layer, that’s where the two of you meet and collaborate, right? You have the structure of what the things are that you can identify and label semantically. That’s where it gets meta, because you’re using semantics to categorize what you have content wise, but then what they are and the other attributes of them that you identify with the taxonomy.
Larry:
Do organizations think nowadays about a semantic layer, or that orchestration, I think is the other word you used? How do the organizations that you’ve interacted with think about that? Or do you have to educate them about how to think about it?
Joyce:
I think both. We’ve seen some organizations call it taxonomy, of course knowledge graphs. Ontology is a buzzword. But also the semantic layer, I think we’re more and more trying to teach them to not put… You need a taxonomy or ontology or any other content structure. What I usually do if an organization ask for a taxonomy, but I see that they more need an ontology, I keep calling it a taxonomy. Because that’s how it’s used within the organization, how they use it. That’s where the buzzwords comes from. So, I would say we just call it like that. But then in meetings, et cetera, we try to insert the semantic layer, so to broaden the scope of what they need.
Ilse:
Yeah, and I think we empower teams we work with. The people we work with are mostly in one department and then you meet people from another department. We give them these one-liners. We give them this, “When you are in an elevator…” Because we are not, of course, full-time embedded in these orgs, but part-time. We say, “When you meet your VP or, I don’t know, your CTO, then you say this.” So, we try to empower the people around us when they meet the people that are able to empower them to say what it’s about. We are going to get question from, “What is the instant gratification from a taxonomy?” It’s like water from the tap. You can drink it, it’s necessary. That is the story we need to evangelize, I think.
Joyce:
And we have to explain it over and over again. It’s like a boomerang. Sometimes we throw it away, we explain it, we have a nice presentation, and then after a few months it comes back from people you didn’t expect it to be. But I think that’s also for us good to be conscious about that. For us, the semantic approach is broader. But apparently that’s not for everyone within an organization, so we have to repeat that message over and over again, and keep empowering, as Ilse said, the people that have to spread that message.
Larry:
That’s great. I love that. I’ve heard similar things from a lot of consultants, that it’s when they say back to you what you told them that you know you’ve succeeded in the message, especially when you hear it from somebody that you didn’t directly say it to. That’s really, really good.
Larry:
So much of this is about connections. And you mentioned that a moment ago, Ilse. I’m really curious about the connections between your practices, the relationship, how you two identify and collaborate around the structure and the semantics of the content projects you work on.
Ilse:
Where we collaborate, of course we both audit. The most wonderful moment is when you have a new client and there opens doors to a whole new domain. And then I can see Joyce’s eyes twinkle, twinkle, and mine too, because we can go in and explore and look for the essence: The essence in concepts and, for me, essence in redundancy or structure, the content modeling of different systems. That is what we share.
Ilse:
But structuring, for me, is like you need to… Most content is still blob, however work we put in as content practitioner, so I need to structure and to condense. That is where I need Joy, because structured content goes hand in hand with metadata, and Joyce is also doing her structuring. It’s not structure like spreadsheet structure, like a content model, but concepts.
Joyce:
Yeah. And that’s where we combine what we do. And I think, indeed, it starts in the analysis phase, but it’s also in levering back what we see with the organization. I think we get a lot of questions on, “Is this a content type? Is this a taxonomy?” And then we said, “Let’s figure that out together. We’re not working in silos over here, not in the content silos, but neither is the taxonomy or the content model or however you call it. That’s not in a silo, in that sense.”
Ilse:
I also think that when you make an ontology, you capture tacit knowledge from an organization.
Joyce:
Yeah.
Ilse:
This tacit knowledge about this concepts who live there in the different silos, you connect them, this knowledge in people’s heads, through your ontology or through your taxonomy, so then you capture… Really, it’s about the connection between this human knowledge, which is implicit, and you make it explicit with a structural artifact, be it a content model or a ontology taxonomy.
Ilse:
I think especially now, since ’22, we are working with lots of content that has grown. It’s not modeled, it’s grown. I know every org has an innovation or data science team who goes gen AI. We know. Especially for these teams and for these developments, it’s very important to know in-house you have structural artifacts that can help scaffold your gen AI.
Ilse:
This retrieval augmented generation you talk about a lot, Larry, a taxonomy can be input for that, and ontology can be input for that. Especially now, these structural-artifacts products we make can capture this human feedback loop in this new AI content grown world. I don’t know if I’m too abstract and…
Larry:
Oh, no. I love the way you articulate that. I’ve come at that from several different angles, but the way you just said it too is that the structure of both the conceptual work that Joyce is doing and the structural content work that you’re doing, either or both of those can provide the scaffolding that you hang gen AI content on. That’s brilliant. Thank you.
Joyce:
Perfect, yeah. And I think the input from domain experts is really important in that, as Ilse already said. If we look at a large language model, for instance, that’s also based on data that is already there. And what I’m trying to do in a taxonomy is to also capture content or concepts that are coming up, like new services. Of course, I can’t predict the future, but I want to be taxonomy as future-proof as possible. The only way to get that in the taxonomy is from feedback or input from domain or people in general.
Larry:
You’re reminding me, the example that’s probably going to be in every book going forward is the pandemic. “Wait, we didn’t have COVID-19.” But if you have a taxonomy in place, you have a place to put that, right? Is that the idea?
Joyce:
Yeah, yeah. COVID is the biggest example. I don’t think I could have predicted that either in the taxonomy. If you look at new services, new products coming up within an organization, there are plans before there is a policy that will be made that is available before the content is ready. So, you want to have your taxonomy ready for that, or ontology, or…
Larry:
Nice. Ilse, it looked like you were about to say something?
Ilse:
No, no, no.
Larry:
I just want to point out… Go ahead, yeah?
Ilse:
I was just thinking about this post from Jason Scott about metadata. Do you know this? This is really about connection, like metadata is about connection. He said something like, “Metadata is really a love note.” It might be to yourself, but in fact it’s a love note to the person after you or the machine after you. Putting metadata on your content information saves that other machine or that other person who comes after you a lot of time. I love it. I love it. I love this quote. Thank you, Jason. Thank you.
Larry:
I just interviewed a metadata strategist. I don’t know if you met Vera when we were in London, Vera Brozzoni, the BBC metadata strategist. I just interviewed her for the new knowledge graph podcast yesterday. She used that exact same quote. She said that, “Metadata is a love letter to the future.”
Larry:
Hey, I can’t believe it, we’re coming up close to time. But before we wrap up, I want to give each of you a chance. Is there anything you want to revisit from the conversation, or that you just want to make sure we share before we wrap up? Either of you can go for it.
Ilse:
Yeah. I would say it’s more to all content practitioners who are in these silos, hang in there. There’s this Dutch saying that is, “veranderen is volharden”, which translates to, “To change is to persevere.” I would say, keep up going on, and have some patience.
Because I know you can talk to your senior management and address this terrible CMS you have to implement, forced by your implementation partner and you addressed this twice and they didn’t listen. But be patient, because in 10 years your senior management will be retired and you can take that position. So, keep up the good work.
Larry:
Thank you. Joyce?
Joyce:
From a taxonomy perspective, I would advise to, if possible, use your taxonomy, if you get asked for creating a taxonomy, as a Trojan horse. Bring all the knights, give it… It’s a good gift. Present it as a nice gift, but have that holistic approach. And use it to change not only the taxonomy, but also the content, breaking or embracing these content silos that are in there. Another thing in line with that, I think you should treat taxonomy, creation and maintenance not as a project, because that’s what I’ve seen also a lot. “Okay, now it’s done. Thank you.” It’s a process. You have to keep working on it. The taxonomy is never finished in that sense, so keep nourishing and embracing that taxonomy.
Larry:
And operationalizing it.
Joyce:
Exactly.
Larry:
I love the Trojan image. That’s beautiful. That’s part of the future-proofing, but it’s also nice and diabolical like this. Your evil plot to put taxonomy in the org.
Joyce:
Exactly.
Ilse:
We are mercenaries, Larry. We said it. We’ve seen things.
Larry:
You should wear army fatigues or something and berets and parachute in. No, I don’t know. But, hey. Oh, hey-
Ilse:
We use this war metaphor, like the Trojan horse, but basically, we love connecting with people and we love empowering them. It’s all about connection, and really, everyone needs a process. Within the org, when we come in as external consultants, we are your partner. And it’s wonderful to work the two of us together because we are each other’s partner, and that’s very important. You can’t do this alone.
Larry:
No. That’s a perfect note to end on. One very last thing: If folks want to connect with you online, what’s the best place to follow you or connect on social media or elsewhere?
Ilse:
LinkedIn.
Joyce:
I would say LinkedIn. Yeah. That’s-
Larry:
That’s always the answer these days. Funny how that works.
Ilse:
Because before we had Twitter, but now…
Larry:
Rest in peace. Thank you both so much. This was a really fun conversation.
Ilse:
Thank you.
Joyce:
Thank you. It was nice talking to you.
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