Chapter 6. Content Modeling
At the risk of triggering bad memories, consider the form you have to complete at the local Department of Motor Vehicles when renewing your driverâs license. Youâre envisioning a sheet of paper with tiny boxes, arenât you?
But what if it wasnât like that? Imagine that instead of a form, you just got a blank sheet of paper on which youâre expected to write a free-form essay identifying yourself and providing all the information you can think of. Then someone at the DMV sits down to read your essay and extract all the particular information the DMV needs. If the information isnât thereâfor instance, you forgot to include your birthdate because no one told you to put it in your essayâthey send you back to try again.
You might have thought it impossible to make the experience of renewing your driverâs license worse, but Iâd wager that this process might accomplish just that.
Thankfully, the DMV has forms with separate boxes for you to input different information: your name, your birthdate, etc. These boxes even have labels describing them and prompts to ensure you enter the information in the correct format: there might be âmm/dd/yyyyâ in the birthdate field, two dashes in the Social Security number field, and checkboxes for âmaleâ or âfemale.â
The people who designed this form considered the range of information they needed from people, and then structured it. They broke it into separate boxes on the form, and took steps ...
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