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I am an information Architect and UX Designer. I am in the process of classifying content for an internal knowledge base and find myself in a bit of a struggle separating topics that are primarily used for navigation and types of articles that i am proposing to use as metadata for search filters.

The general approach is that users can browse content by topic and filter using metadata. To give an example:

"Account Management" is a topic while "Procedures" is an article type.

So while I intuitively classified the content this way. I would like to :

  1. Understand What is the difference between a topic and a type of content?
  2. Know of any resources or reference material that i can use to improve my knowledge on the subject

Hope that my question is clear but happy to clarify and add more details i f need be

Many Thanks

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    The topic is the subject at hand. The type of content is anything at all depending on what your personal definition of "type" and "content" is. Maybe it's exactly the same as the topic. Maybe it's something comletely different such as the file extension. There can be no material to improve your knowledge on the subject because you are the one defining both the subject and the knowledge. It is your data, and you are free to organize it every which way you please. There is little point in us suggesting that you should organize it by year or language. We don't know what the data even is.
    – RegDwigнt
    Commented May 7, 2020 at 16:28

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The matter of how you organize your information is off topic here. However the meanings of the terms you ask about are easily answered.

Topic means the subject matter of the information. So if your information is about animals, then the topic is "animals". If it is about algorithms then the topic is "algorithms".

"Type of content" is a very vague term, as "type" refers to any sort of classification. However if it specifically isn't the "topic" then it probably means the format or medium - for example, is it a journal article, a blog post, a video lecture, etc. But it might mean other things like whether it is a university-level text or a grade school description.

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  • There are probably specifying definitions in play, which would make this off-topic. Different corporations etc using terms in subtly different ways.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented May 7, 2020 at 16:23

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