Joe Gollner likes solving puzzles. In fact, he often draws on his passion for history and philosophy to help him with the paradigms for modern-day conundrums. “That’s probably why I work so much,” admits Joe, “though it doesn’t feel like work to me. I love to figure out things that initially baffle me.”

The push for increasing complex ways of process content is nothing new to Gollner. He has worked on projects with millions of pages of content that have to be manipulated in quite granular and exacting ways. His quest is to help systems process content in “intelligent” ways. This means using content to its full potential, combining contexts to allow users to extract its inherent knowledge. His paper on The Emergence of Intelligent Content is a look inside the nature and history of content technologies that has led us to where we are today.

His pleasure at solving this dilemma is apparent; he isn’t satisfied because of the technological solution, but because it solves a user experience problem and a business problem. “Content is so important that we can no longer afford to treat it like a cottage industry,” says Joe. “Corporations are starting to realize that we need to apply the same care and discipline to them as we do with the rest of our corporate assets.”

Gollner presents Beyond Publishing: Exploring What We Are Really Doing With Web Content and a workshop on Engineering Web Content: A Workshop in Two Parts at Web Content Chicago 2009.