Intelligence
How is expertise structured?
Why it matters
How is expertise structured?
Knowledge an assistant cannot parse is knowledge it will not use. Most travel information exists as prose on a page, a PDF of opening hours, a spreadsheet nobody exports, a booking system with no readable surface.
Structure is what turns a paragraph a human can read into a fact a machine can answer with. It is also what makes accuracy maintainable, because a structured fact has one place to change and a paragraph has many.
What to identify
Where to look first
- What currently exists only as prose, PDF or image.
- Which facts are duplicated across systems and drift apart.
- The shape of the questions being asked, and whether your information answers them.
- What would have to be true for an answer to be assembled correctly.
Assessment
Four questions worth answering honestly
- Could a machine extract your opening hours without reading a sentence?
- Is the same fact stored in more than one place, with no agreement between them?
- Do you know which questions your information cannot currently answer?
- Is accessibility information structured, or buried in a document?
Maturity
Where organisations usually sit
- Unstructured. Everything is prose, PDFs and screenshots.
- Partial. Some structured data exists, mostly by accident of a system.
- Deliberate. Key facts are structured, though coverage has gaps.
- Comprehensive. Structure follows the questions travellers actually ask.
- Maintained. Structure is governed, versioned and kept current by design.
Find out where you stand
Most engagements begin with a baseline across all six pillars, and a view of which one is holding the others back.