To use an analogy, a nice clean office could be considered structured.
Whereas a messy desk is not very structured. Perhaps the person using this desk knows where everything is, but likely not.
A web page can be ordered or unorganized. In this case I think it is difficult to figure out what this site even does. It appears that it is an Electronic commerce site.
So as not to pick on only other websites, some of our pages on The University of Akron website are untidy and unorganized. In this case there are email links to people in the Office, some random links that don’t seem to be too related to the office and then some Research news stories below that.
There is a design genre that is popular right now that has a messy feeling. Although this site is a bit messy looking, the data is really pretty organized.
So a definition of Structured Data is content that is ordered in a way that makes it easy to reuse and provides some consistency across usages.
This webpage is a people directory. The list has names and titles. The name is a link that can be clicked on for more information about that person. This is nicely structured and very orderly. You could imagine sharing this data with another department. Perhaps some of these people exist in more than one department on campus and each department could have their own page of faculty.
When you click through, you get the detailed information for that person.
Here is a nicely organized part of The University of Akron website. We provide a comparison application for our Residence Halls. You can pick up to three halls to compare. The name of the Residence Hall is a link to detailed data for that Hall.
This is what you see if you click through to the detail for the Residence Hall.
The Browse Research Tools breaks down our Library Research tools by category. You can click through on the category to list out Tools for that Category.
A list of the type of Research tool appears and you can click through to get the detail for that tool here.
Here is a further click into the research tool.
Database data will need some type of connector and web programming language to pull it and transform it into web content. The other structures are text files and would need to be transformed into html to display as web content. XML has become a preferred format for portability and reusability.
SQL can be used as a text format
XML describes the data using elements and attributes
XML is more verbose and is more human readable.
Go to in a tab: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgi1JQGHENI
Using DotCMS we’ll create a Continuing Education Course Structure.
This would be the result of the Courses that I currently have listed. Look under data-presentation on www.
Here is the course detail
Building a structure builds a webform for data entry
Searching for content in the backend. Let’s add some dates to the existing content.
Course begins date shows up on the front end.
We have a table of Majors and Minors that quickly display the Majors you can earn. A click on the Program name brings you to a detail page.
Faculty and Staff profiles have a structured format.