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Teodora Petkova is a scholar and content marketer whose PhD dissertation explored semantic technologies and dialogical theory and how they apply in the field of digital marketing communication.
She thoughtfully combines her rigorous academic thinking with pragmatic data- and knowledge-management practices in her content-marketing work.
She’s currently building a knowledge graph with marketing content at Ontotext, the RDF database and data-management platform company.
We talked about:
- her work building a knowledge graph of marketing content at Ontotext
- her book “Being Dialogic” and the concept of dialogic communication
- the importance of metadata in dialogic communication architectures
- how creating a controlled vocabulary or an ontology can support a shared understanding of the concepts stakeholders and users work with
- her overview of the semantic web
- her current study with the 90-year-old marketing-education legend Philip Kotler
- the connections she makes between corporate knowledge management and corporate marketing
- the utility of enterprise-wide controlled vocabularies
- how your content efforts can help you curate your knowledge graph
- the urgent need to cultivate the social practices to help us generate and curate metadata
Teodora’s bio
Teodora Petkova is a philologist fascinated by the metamorphoses of text on the Web and curious about the ways the Semantic Web unfolds. She holds a PhD. in Marketing Communication, an MS in Creative writing and a Bachelor of Science in Classics. Teodora is the author of the books The Brave New Text and Being Dialogic.
Following her genuine commitment to creating dialogic moments through semantic annotations, from 2022, Teodora is part of the Ontotext Knowledge Graph team. The Ontotext Knowledge Graph is where Teodora strives to harness the potential of the Semantic Web to foster dialogic marketing communications. Driven by the fascination with the ever-evolving nature of text on the Web, Teodora is also teaching web writing to students at the Content Strategy Masters program in FH Joanneum.
Connect with Teodora online
Teodora’s books
Resources mentioned in this interview
- How to Do Things with Data, Klaus Bruhn Jensen
- The Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila
- Marketing 4.0: Moving from Traditional to Digital, Philip Kotler
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast, episode number 7. When you combine deep academic curiosity, a powerful concept like the semantic web, and an intellectually innovative approach to understanding how humans, computers, and corporate knowledge interact, you get Teodora Petkova’s concept of “dialogic communication.” Combine this powerful idea with a nuanced appreciation for modern marketing and carefully curated enterprise metadata and you can powerfully convey your organization’s value to the world.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number seven of the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show, Teodora Petkova. Teodora is just an ordinary content writer stumbled into the knowledge graph world. So welcome to the show, Teodora. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you are doing these days.
Teodora:
Hi, Larry. Thanks for having me. I’m doing what I have been dreaming about. I’m building a knowledge graph with Ontotext, out of marketing content, and I’m doing a lot of fights, a lot of things that I imagined and envisioned, but they need to be translated into specifications and requirements. So I now have a lot of time to write, do content writing per se; however, I write in the book of life.
Larry:
Yeah, because your writing is; it’s not like my original career was in book publishing, and you just got a manuscript from somebody and turned it into a thing and put it out in the world, and that was that. A little different world these days. But the foundation of this new world you’ve articulated this one aspect of modern communication I think is really important, this notion of dialogic communication. Can you talk a little? I know this, and just for background for folks, this was Teodora’s whole PhD dissertation, so that’s a big subject, but I’m hoping to get just sort of an overview for folks who want to dip into the waters of the dialogic communication.
Teodora:
And that’s my book; that’s called Being Dialogic, and it’s steps on the shoulders of being digital. So to transition to that idea of the world being new, we all think that being digital and digitalization and everything is the core of that new communication, and yet the web is the core. And Cyberia, the so-called Cyberia that cyberscape is the core. Where we communicate in a many-to-many scenario and there are different audiences, algorithmic ones included, but to get all of that academic and maybe to theoretical cloud, we are now in the position to say, “Why would I read you? Why would I buy from you? Why would my fridge automatically order potatoes from your website or from your API?”
Teodora:
And that communication is exciting. Where does dialogue come in? It has never been out of this. The thing is that we are now in the position to, I wouldn’t say, design dialogue because that’s not dialogic; you don’t design a dialogue. However, you can design for and build systems for dialogic orientation, meaning you can listen, embed feedback into your systems and into your loop, and you are not. We as marketers are now not in the position to shout and to publish relentlessly. We’re in the position to understand what exactly the user needs and what are their data needs.
Teodora:
Final sentence: why do I say data needs? Because I might need to compare products, my app, my personal agent, my personal knowledge graph. I might want to hook it to your enterprise knowledge graph and see what happens. But that’s, of course, too visionary. It’s not reality yet. However, that new way of, as we said in the preliminary conversation, of allowing the user to pull content, read content with all the metadata artifacts in it. Is the new reality, at least for me.
Larry:
Yeah, and I think that thing you just said about building a system that supports dialogic communication, you can’t really design any one communicative situation, but you can design the setting in a way that, like, “Here’s some content, here’s some metadata that goes with it, here’s the other things you need to have this dialogic communication, and whether you’re a human being or a computer,” am I hearing that right?
Teodora:
Yes, you are. And because I’m living that every day now, and I’m thinking how easily we slip into saying, “Here’s some content, here’s some metadata, here’s the situation.” However, if we get our hands dirty with that, think about that. Here’s content. What content? What shall we write about? Here’s metadata. Okay, what metadata? What are the controlled vocabularies we would use? What are our systems? How metadata terribly overlaps across different systems? How departments speak with different metadata, how they talk about one and the same thing with different tags and with different naming in the different systems, and how that juggles or whatever. I’m not sure what the word is, but the internal flow is hampered by such inconsistencies. We’re terrible at metadata; let’s face it. Maybe not we, but at least from my experience, I’ve seen a lot of misunderstanding at the level of metadata, which is misunderstanding at the level of dialogue. Do we have the systems to hear each other and to agree upon shared meanings?
Larry:
What you just said, that seems key to this whole thing. Because I think about, I’m deep into the technical structured content stuff, and I think about metadata as just this conceptual thing that helps you stitch back together disarticulated or intelligently unarticulated chunks of content. But when you’re putting them back together, you have to have the metadata. And similarly, in a dialogic situation where you’re trying to, like you just said, agree on meaning. Tell me how metadata can help people and/or machines arrive at a common understanding of what they’re talking about and what they’re trying to accomplish.
Teodora:
Semantically, the answer is in your question. For me, when you’re creating a controlled vocabulary or when you’re creating an ontology, you are going through that process of reaching shared understanding. I’m trying to ground this talk into tangible things. What tags do we use for certain content types? For example, in WordPress, how do we measure the performance of these tags? How are these tags and their values related to our HubSpot measuring system? Can we say what content brings what people? Can we design journeys by embedding business logic in our metadata?
Larry:
Interesting. And one of the things you just said is reaching that shared understanding. Then you immediately got me back into my comfort zone, which is talking to both the internal stakeholders and users, all the people involved with the system, and just coming to a basic agreement about what do you mean by the word “customer” or “product”, or things like that. And that’s sort of like, it’s not always called a controlled vocabulary, but once you’ve come to that agreement, it can serve as such. And what you just said, you just kind of touched on a whole bunch of different things like marketing metrics and customer journey mapping.
Teodora:
Yes. I have a troubled life because I’m trying to… No, by the way, it’s good that you’re saying it because I’m talking like this as if it’s a mesh, and it can be a mesh when we talk at that abstract level, but when we drill down and see who needs to do what, we need to differentiate. So allow me to give an example about shared understanding and meaning and metadata tags. Very recently, and I’m very proud of my student, he, because I teach web writing to people in a content strategy program, in a university in Austria. So he chose me to be his, I’m not sure what the word is, mentor for his thesis, but he went through a classical process of content strategy interviews and finding taxonomies, finding terms, and he tried to give suggestions to. It’s called the Elevate Festival. It’s a political festival, but there’s music, and they have a lot of YouTube content.
Teodora:
The thing is that, throughout the process, he was able to see how the internal people are tagging content. Then he made a research to see how people are searching for that content, and then it was like a realization that all that can be manifested in a social media strategy through tags. And it appears that people never connected the dots, that the tags they use in their CMS can be tags that organize their social media posts. And maybe that sounds too simple for you, but I don’t know. It was an example of how common sense is broken across systems just because we think of metadata as something separate from our communication, and it is not, and this is why I want to bridge that understanding of dialogic communication, of dialogic orientation, to the tools and the systems we use when we communicate with all that giant amount of texts and content. We need to be able to put that in a library, in folders, and be able to communicate that at a higher level.
Teodora:
And something you didn’t ask me, and I wanted to share with you when I knew we would be talking today. I’m reading an essay. I’ll share it in the links. It’s called How to Do Things with Metadata, and it’s based on an essay from the 60s, which is called How to Do Things With Words. And the reason I’m mentioning this here is because, yes, our topic is knowledge graphs, but at the very top of the mountain, our topic is communicating value and connecting on being on the same page, staying on the same page. When is communication effective? It’s so simple when the so-called recipient, if we use the communication theory language, when the recipient understands you and in all our processes, in everything, in building a knowledge graph, in creating metadata guidelines, in creating content briefs. We’re all the time forgetting that meaning is situational, and dialogue is the portal to that, to cracking that situation.
Larry:
Tell me a little bit more about how that works, especially in, it sounds like a lot of this is in an enterprise setting. Because you’ve talked a lot about cross-functional collaboration and things.
Teodora:
Yes.
Larry:
Is that what you’re talking about there?
Teodora:
Yeah. I mean, before, I knew that from a theoretical level, and now I’m doing it in practice, and it’s very hard and it takes; you need to be brave and crazy to do it because there are a lot of hurdles, and the legacy of understanding marketing is pitching. There’s the legacy of understanding publishing content is churning five blog posts about seven ways to use knowledge graphs in healthcare.
Teodora:
And then there’s the understanding that I will tag with anything, and maybe I don’t care what’s the information architecture of my website; what will be my JSON-LD under the hood? Will my tagging be consistent with the tagging in my internal documents? Why do I need it? Well, because a newly arriving person in sales might want to check what we wrote about or our internal documents about a certain industry. Why not have it readily available? And I don’t know where I started from, but I know where I started from. That was always my vision. When we are writing on the web or in a connected system, we need these tags, we need the metadata, we need the distillation of our writing into a triple. I’m mentioning triple, just to help you transition.
Larry:
Yeah, actually no, I was just going to say I was looking for an opportunity to talk about the whole like the semantic web, because that’s in terms of an umbrella term that can encompass almost everything you’ve talked about, I think. That concept of the semantic web is a great organizing mechanism. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Teodora:
Yes. Exactly.
Larry:
I don’t know how familiar a term that is to my folks. So if you could give sort of an quick history, quick overview of the semantic web and how that fits into…
Teodora:
I have all the time. Yeah. When somebody asks me about that, I’m intimidated because there are so many people that can do that better than me. So allow me a rhetorical approach where I say that I’m looking at the semantic web from my content writers’ perspective, and my fascination with the semantic web came from there. And allow me a metaphor again or a story. I put that in my book, but I’ll quickly say that again. When Sir Tim Berners-Lee was presenting the idea of a flat web versus a web that is connected, he was saying that if an intelligence from space comes to us and sees our web, they will see just pages and links; they will not understand anything. So very briefly, if the web is semantic, they would understand not that A is linked to B, but that A is linked to B in this and this way. Teodora is linked to Larry, or my website links to yours is totally different from the person. Teodora knows the person Larry, and that’s friend of a friend ontology, FOAF.
Larry:
Yeah. And that’s one… Yeah, go ahead.
Teodora:
And the other thing again, for people who don’t know about the semantic web, it’s a great opportunity that you don’t know anything, because you can build new experiences and you can imagine yourself without the curse of knowledge. What we can do with that, because it’s a way of creating machine-readable content; machine-readable understanding is a big word. But again, in that article where Hendler, Lassila, and Berners-Lee wrote for Scientific American, there’s this assistant of a person called Pete that’s an algorithmic assistant, a personal assistant who manages the booking for a doctor’s appointment for his mom and kind of juggles his calendar and his sister’s calendar.
Teodora:
And we’re getting back to three foundational, maybe we can call them research topics, but they’re also problems to be solved: interoperability, personal assistants, and the creation of different applications. And these are the things we’re banging our heads with in marketing. Organization of knowledge. How can we promote that knowledge to people, given people have now personal assistants? And then, what systems can we build to allow people to get something from us? Because they are the empowered user. We are not in the position to sell and market anymore in the ways we used to.
Larry:
And yet I still see a lot of marketing communication that feels almost out of Mad Men, still kind of pushy. But you’ve talked a lot about the “pull” nature of modern marketing communication, over the nation, over “push”. Can you talk just a little bit because you just mentioned that, but if you could talk just a little bit more about that? Yeah.
Teodora:
Yeah. It’s not that like Mad Men, okay, but let’s think Ogilvy and real marketers, and the beautiful thing is that I’m now attending a course with Philip Kotler. He’s about 90 now, and his mind is super sharp, and he’s, again, super user-centric, focused on what we can do with marketing to attract people to help them, to build for them. He’s absolutely not about pushing, et cetera. But again, the push-pull thing, Ogilvy in the 60s knew that… And there’s this quote that, “If you can’t say something to your aunt or your mom, don’t write that in advertising.” So the people you are marketing to are not morons; they’re not dumb; you are there to serve them. And to be honest, I’m not sure where, in what stage of building communications, we get lost into the idea that we can speak BS and sell.
Teodora:
Maybe that works for… By the way, here we also need differentiation. If we look at digital, at Marketing 4.0, that’s Kotler again, 2017, I think. There is this differentiation between different industries, so in a fast-paced industry where price doesn’t matter, you can say anything; maybe nobody will pay attention to your ad; they just need the product. It costs $1; I don’t care. But then you have different industries, and you have the industry where you buy a Porsche, and you need a totally different approach there. So again, when we are talking about knowledge graphs or marketing communication, I love that we need to be creative every time. There is no one approach; at least this is my belief, and I know that that’s not very… I mean, many times I’m the crazy person in the room, but that’s fine for me because, for me, the web is not our giant marketing channel where we will spit nonsense. We need to build that web of data. And again, a hypothesis: we’re not doing content marketing; we’re now in the business of managing knowledge.
Larry:
Well, that’s one of the things that really fascinates me about your work, is that drawing the connection and showing the connection between corporate knowledge management and corporate marketing. I think in most organizations, those departments who are on whole different sides of the building and rarely communicating with one another. How do you see those? Because it makes sense to me, but I’ve had trouble selling executives or other folks on the idea. How do you present that to people? That, again, back to the cross-disciplinary, the benefits of that kind of cross-disciplinary, if not collaboration, at least understanding and communication.
Teodora:
Yeah, it’s very hard. I presented that as a vision. We talked about that. I have a lot of presentations, and I also don’t get buy-in for that. There is no maturity, and people are still not seeing the link between the entire knowledge in the organization and your public communication. And it’s common sense. I mean, we’ll get there; I don’t know when, but we’ll get there. So now I stopped preaching, and I’m just waiting for people to realize that they need to connect things.
Teodora:
For example, in Ontotext, there’s a wonderful person who is working on the SEO side of the documentation, and that was, I mean, totally independent of our working on the SEO of the marketing communications. But then, because we talked and then we realized this is one and the same thing, or it’s not one and the same thing, it needs to be fed with certain, again, controlled vocabularies that are enterprise-wide accepted. And I realize that I shouldn’t push; I need to allow a folksonomy or something to emerge to see which process will be the seed that will grow. I realized you cannot do top-down. Maybe you can, but you need to be super strong and maybe have some tools to hit people and chase them.
Larry:
That’s something that comes up in this world in the knowledge graph world a lot, like in ontology engineering and ontology design, that it’s often an interplay between the top-down. You have sensible, reasonable, provable hypotheses about how this might work and so, therefore, how you might organize things at a higher level. But then, as you just said, you’re also pragmatic. You’re like, “Okay, great. I’ll tuck that away and just go see what tags are showing up in the folksonomy.” I guess, maybe tell me a little bit about the ontology behind the Ontotext knowledge graph. Has it developed that way with your ideas coming in and then listening to the data?
Teodora:
It did, and I have nothing to do with that. I mean, you need an ontologist who is a hardcore data person, and at Ontotext, this is Vladimir Alexiev. I created it together with Atanas Kiryakov, the CEO of Ontotext, a content model. And then Vladimir Alexiev took that and created a data model, but he created it lege artis, meaning he created it with all the conceptual might one can use. For example, the ontology of the event is brute force. I’ll send you the link.
Teodora:
It’s beautiful. I called it a mind map, and he didn’t get mad, but he realized how simple I am. And that, by the way, reminds me of Maria Keets, if you know her book from Mind Maps to Ontology and Engineering. So, with my little simple understanding about content and about the world from that a content model grew into that data model where you can embed not only business logic but the ability for the system to do inference. And imagine how you feed that into the spaghetti system of WordPress. Do you know what’s the answer? You don’t. We are having a number of calls still continuing with the developers in WordPress. How our URL structure should be, how can we incorporate that understanding of our models? Because on our website, an event is a different thing from a webinar, but from an ontologist, purist perspective, a webinar is a type of event. So it’s beautiful, but it’s very hard, and you need that interdisciplinary collaboration.
Larry:
Yeah, no, and I’m smiling because you’re right, back in my world now, this is what I’ve… And events is always the classic thing in content modeling. And anyhow, that’s a whole other conversation.
Teodora:
No, it’s not, it’s not. It’s the same. It’s about being dialogic, not only with your public communication, but being dialogic enough to open up as a department and say, “Okay, I’ll listen to the ontologist,” and then our ontologist will listen to our crappy WordPress or information architecture because that’s the reality.
Larry:
And you have such a great pragmatic approach. And boy, when you’re trying to do fancy semantic stuff in a simple system like WordPress, that’ll challenge you to no end.
Teodora:
Yeah. But again, I have this crazy idea. It’s not a crazy idea. I hope we’ll be realizing it in the upcoming six months, using your content efforts to curate your knowledge graph. Again, super common sense and super hard to go there, but we will go there because, think about it, in the preliminary notes again, you shared, “Let’s talk about graph thinking.” Can we please talk about thinking? Of course, it’s not graph thinking; it’s thinking. And our systems, the semantic web, this is why I love that concept and the research, and everything. It’s the closest to the way we see and think about the world.
Teodora:
And I digressed and wanted to read something about metadata and about communication, and this is where dialogue and knowledge graphs come in. The classical debate, “Do we copy or construct reality through our representations and communications?” Do we copy or do we construct? It’s both. And this is why the times are so exciting, and this is why you need a knowledge graph built of semantic technology to be able not only to copy reality, because reality is that interconnected, that WordPress does not represent it at all, and that’s fine. But you also need to be able to construct reality. And the funny thing is that when you’re writing a SPARQL query, there is this construct element.
Larry:
That’s beautiful, and this is like a whole other… Now I want to do two or three more episodes because the introduction of LLMs and their ability to help, to build knowledge graphs, that’s a whole thing that unfolds from that. But I can’t believe we’re coming up close to time already too.
Teodora:
My dog. Yeah.
Larry:
I know it always goes way too fast, and we got to do this many more times. But before we wrap up today, is there anything last, anything you want to revisit from the conversation, or just make sure that you share before we wrap up?
Teodora:
Yes. We badly need metadata; even if it’s not semantic web metadata, we don’t have the social practices to weave good communication built not only of content but also with the view to classifying all these artifacts we put on the web when we’re doing marketing. So if that’s my last premortal message, it’s doing marketing with the web of data in mind; we’re not publishing content; we’re building a web of data and a corpus of knowledge and our people, the users, our stakeholders, internal, external; they’re not stupid, and they are us; they’re our mom. We need to be aware of the ecology of being on the web.
Larry:
I love that the ecology and especially the way you set up that ecology, the elements of that, building a web of data, a corpus of knowledge, and just forget, I mean, so many of us, like I come out of book publishing, I’m not stuck in it, but I still fight it every day, those publishing instincts. And anyhow…
Teodora:
What are the publishing instincts? What do you mean?
Larry:
Oh, just the propensity to mansplain and share all the time, instead of… I’m getting better every day at listening and understanding.
Teodora:
Exactly.
Larry:
Yeah. Just from, I was raised by an editor. Yeah, it’s bad. But hey, Teodora, one very last thing: if folks want to connect with you or follow you online, what’s the best place to find you?
Teodora:
Yeah, they can read me on teodorapetkova.com, and most importantly, I’m doing a newsletter now, where every month I will be presenting knowledge graphs that power content experiences. And I really hope with that, the idea of building and managing knowledge weaves into all our content efforts because it’s worth it.
Larry:
And I’ve seen you mention a few examples of that in your book, and I’ll link to that in the show notes as well. I’ll link to your newsletter, link to your website.
Teodora:
Thank you.
Larry:
And thank you so much, Teodora. Always a pleasure to catch up. And we got to do this again soon.
Teodora:
Yeah.
