Discoverability

Discoverability is the ability of something, especially a piece of content or information, to be found. Discoverability is a concern in library and information science, many aspects of digital media, software and web development, and in marketing, since a thing cannot be used if people cannot find it or don't understand what it's for. Metadata, or "information about information," such as a book's title, a product's description, or a website's keywords, affects how discoverable something is. Organizing information by putting it into alphabetical order or including it in a search engine is an example of how to improve discoverability. Discoverability is related to, but different from, accessibility and usability, other qualities that affect the usefulness of a piece of information.

The usage of any piece of information directly relates to how discoverable it is. The quality of information depends upon the quality of the meta-information.

In the case of a service-oriented solution, because of the emphasis placed on service reusability, it stands very clear that opportunities should exist for reuse, which is only possible if information is discoverable in the first place. To make services discoverable, the following set of activities need to be performed:

Apart from increasing the reuse potential of the services, discoverability is also required to avoid development of solution logic that is already contained in an existing service. To design services that are not only discoverable but also provide interpretable information about their capabilities, the service discoverability principle provides guidelines that could be applied during the service-oriented analysis phase of the service delivery process.

In relation to audiovisual content, according to the meaning given by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission for the purpose of the Discoverability Summit, discoverability can be summed up to the intrinsic ability of given content to "stand out of the lot", or to position itself so as to be easily found and discovered. A piece of audiovisual content can be a movie, a TV series, music, a book (eBook) or even an audio book.

Even before the user’s intervention, discoverability is the prime factor of a piece of audiovisual content’s discovery in the various digital modes of content consumption (e.g. Netflix for movies, Spotify for music, Audible for audio books, etc., though the concept can also more generally be applied to content found on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and others). It involves more than a content’s mere presence on a given platform; it can involve key words (tags), search algorithms, positioning within different categories, metadata, etc. Thus, discoverability enables as much as it promotes.

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Wikipedia