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Global vs. Local Taxonomies in SharePointJune 2012

ISSN 1554-303X

MONTAGUE INSTITUTE REVIEW

SharePoint 2010 lets you create meta-data — i.e., topic hierarchies (“taxonomies”) and controlled vocabularies (“keywords”) — at both the organization and work group level. But how do you decide which metadata should go where – and how do you implement your decisions in SharePoint? In this article, I’ll discuss some of the design issues, look at how to implement them in the SharePoint Managed Metadata Service, review the implications for users, and offer some planning suggestions.

Managing taxonomies in SharePointA taxonomy is a system for naming and

organizing things into groups that share similar characteristics. The SharePoint system includes two kinds of data structures: topic hierarchies (similar to a table of contents) and keyword lists (also called “controlled vocabularies”). These metadata are associated with both documents and people in a classification or “tagging” func-tion. As an example, see the Montague Institute A - Z index. Each of the alphabetic categories is a keyword list. The “Subjects” link takes you to a topic hierarchy.

Both SharePoint data structures can be used at both the global and local level. Global metadata is used by everyone in an organization. Geographic regions, organization charts, and product lists are three examples. Local metadata is used by one or more departments, divisions, or work groups. In this category are technical and professional vocabularies as well as terms that describe a specific work process or tool. Two fac-tors influence whether metadata should be global or local: ownership and usage.

OwnershipOwners are responsible for creating meta-

data structures and updating them as business needs evolve. Sometimes, the owner is a profes-sional librarian or indexer, but more often it’s someone in the organization unit responsible for

a specific reporting or publishing function, such as creating marketing brochures or quarterly sales forecasts. In this case, users work with program-mers to create metadata needed to produce the required output.

Sometimes, it’s possible to use external metadata, such as the ACM Computing Classi-fication System. However, such external sources usually need to be modified for company-specific uses. They also need to be converted into the required application format (e.g., the SharePoint Managed Metadata Service) and periodically synchronized with the external source.

UsageUsage involves tagging and classifying

documents and people, producing reports, and responding to ad hoc information requests. There can be three levels of users: 1) those in the group that “owns” the metadata; 2) people in related functions (e.g., marketing is related to product management), and 3) people in unrelated domains (e.g., R&D and manufacturing).

Those in the first group are likely to use the same vocabulary and be familiar with how and where documents are stored. Acronyms are familiar, and term definitions are usually not necessary. Users know what query text to type in the search box and which SharePoint sites, lists, and libraries contain the information they need.

Those in the second group may use a similar but not identical vocabulary and are likely to be less familiar with document storage conventions. Some acronyms and terms need to be defined, such as “affinity charting” (product management) or “advertising elasticity” (marketing). Synonyms are useful when users are not sure what to type in the search box or how to spell it. Topic hierarchies are useful for navigating unfamiliar document collections.

Those in the third group are likely to use different vocabularies (e.g., laymen’s terms vs. scientific terms) and even different languages.

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Moreover, they usually have no idea where and how documents are stored — or even if the information is available at all. Synonyms, definitions, topic hier-archies, and translations are necessary. For example, the word “index” means one thing to an editor and another to a computer scientist. “See also” referenc-es are very helpful (e.g., “photovoltaic effect” see also “solar power”).

Implementing taxonomies in Share-Point

The trick is to give users access to the information they need — with-out too many distractions. That means a concise list of tagging suggestions, a relevant list of search results, new document templates with appropriate built-in properties, and a convenient way of discovering related material in unfamiliar domains.

Getting metadata to appear cor-rectly and behave properly involves understanding SharePoint’s Term Store data structure, metadata permissions, and editing commands. To see how these elements work together, we’ll use a simple example with three groups of terms, each of which is managed by a different person (the “taxonomists”).

1. Global. This group contains terms used by the entire organization — a list of geographic regions, a list of products and services offered by the organization, and a topic hierarchy of the company’s areas of interest.

2. Publishing. This group con-tains terms used by authors, editors, and readers of the organization’s in-house newsletter.

3. Technical. This group con-tains terms used by systems analysts, programmers, and other technical staff.

These metadata groups are used in three different SharePoint sites: an organization portal, a publishing site, and a technical site.

Figure 1: Tagging a SharePoint library item using a technical vocabulary. There are no duplicate or irrelevant terms in the list, and it is designed for a technically savvy audience

Figure 2: SharePoint customized search results page showing only content from the Montague Institute Review. Search results include people whose profiles contain the search term.

Figure 3: SharePoint content types are used to enforce consistency when users create new documents. In this example, we’re using a press release content type to create a new document in the preferred format with associated metadata. In this case, the “keywords” property can be managed as a controlled vocabulary in the SharePoint Term Store Management tool.

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Figure 4: Synonyms in SharePoint search results allow users to navigate from the technical term “myocardial infarction” to related documents about the related layman’s term “heart attack.” To make that happen, the taxonomist created a managed metadata term for “heart attack” in the SharePoint Term Store Management Tool and entered “myocardial infarction” as a synonym.

Figure 5: The SharePoint Managed Metadata Service is organized hierarchically. The group level is used as a security boundary that allows the global taxonomist to control who can manage specifi c term sets.

The Managed Metadata Service is also used to syndicate content types across a SharePoint farm. The Content Type Hub is beyond the scope of this article.

Figure 6: SharePoint Term Store showing three groups of term sets for Enterprise, Publishing, and Technical. The global taxonomist can add and edit terms in all the groups. The publishing and technical taxonomists can edit only the term sets in their respective groups.

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Term Store data structureThe Term Store is part of Share-

Point Managed Metadata Service (Figures 5 and 6). The Term Store can contain multiple term sets that can be either topic hierarchies or simple lists. Term sets are organized into groups that correspond with metadata ownership and editing permission. In our example, the global taxonomist can add and edit terms in all the groups. The publishing and technical taxonomists can edit only the term sets in their respective groups.

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Figure 9: Managed Metadata Service (term store administrator view). Note that the current user (Jean Graef), is the group manager for the Publishing group, and user Jeanne is the Term Store contributor.

Figure 8: SharePoint technical site showing items in the Shared Documents library. Documents in this library are tagged with values from the Technical term set.

Figure 7: SharePoint organization home page showing a portion of the Shared Documents library, which is labeled “Montague Institute Review” and shows the most recent articles. Documents in this library are tagged with values from all three of the Term Set groups (i.e., Enterprise, Publishing, Technical).

Regardless of who has permis-sion to create and edit managed meta-data, site and list/library owners can expose the term set values as tagging suggestions, in document templates, and other SharePoint features (Figures 7 and 8).

Term set permissionsTerm set permissions determine

who can create and edit controlled vo-cabularies and topic hierarchies. There are four permission levels:

• Farm administrators can create new term stores, connect to an existing term store, and add or remove term store administrators.

• Term store administrators can create or delete term set groups, add or remove term group managers or con-tributors, import term sets, modify the working languages for the term store, and edit terms. In our example, this is the global taxonomist (Jean Graef).

• Group managers can add or re-move term set contributors, import term sets, create and delete term sets, and edit terms. In our example, the global taxonomist (Jean Graef) is the manager of all three groups -- enterprise, publish-ing, and technical.

• Term set contributors can create, rename, copy, reuse, move, and delete term sets as well as edit terms. In our example, these are the Publishing and Technical taxonomists (Jeanne and Suzanne).

• The term store administrator can view all available metadata, while the group managers can view only those term sets which they control (Figures 9 and 10).

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Figure 10: Managed Metadata Service (term store contributor view). Note that if we log on as user Suzanne, who has contribute privileges for the technical group, we can access only the Technical term set. The other groups and their term sets are grayed out.

Regardless of who has permis-sion to edit them, term sets can be used by any site owner to create new columns for lists, libraries, and sites. Then, any user with edit permission for the indi-vidual item can choose a tag value from the specifi ed term set. Figure 11 shows how a specifi c term set is used to sup-ply values for a new SharePoint library column (“fi eld”). Figure 12 shows how values from the term set are exposed for user tagging.

Figure 11: Creating a new library column. When we log on as user Suzanne, we can select any of the managed metadata term sets to defi ne a new column, even though we don’t have permission to edit all of the terms sets.

In this screen shot, Suzanne, who has contributor permissions for the Technical group of terms, is using one of the term sets in the Enterprise group to defi ne a new library column.

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Figure 12

Enterprise Keywords: A special caseThe SharePoint site owner/de-

signer can also create a new list/library column using Enterprise Keywords — a system-generated term set with three predefined characteristics:

• The Enterprise Keywords col-umn is present by default when you create a new site or site collection. To use it in a list or library, you simply have to activate it by clicking “Enterprise Metadata and Keywords Settings” in list/library settings.

• Enterprise Keywords are an “open” term set, which means that or-dinary users (not just taxonomists with Term Store permissions) can add values (Figure 13).

• When used in a content type or as a list/library column, the auto-complete feature will not only suggest user-defined tags but also all the terms present inside the managed portion of the term store.

As a result, the auto-suggest list for an Enterprise Keyword column can contain duplicate values (Figure 14).

Figure 12: Using managed metadata from the Products & Services term set to tag a SharePoint library document.

Figure 13: Columns defined as Enterprise Keywords include tagging suggestions from both the System Keywords term set (which contains user-created values) as well as all the term sets created by humans. The Enterprise Keywords term set is displayed below the blue dotted line in the “System” group. Term sets created by taxonomists are displayed above the blue dotted line.

Note that by default, the term set is “open,” meaning that users can enter their own tag values.

Figure 14: Tagging suggestions for an Enterprise Keywords library column. Note that the list contains several duplicate terms drawn from different term sets. This creates two problems:

• It lengthens the list of suggestions that the user must review.

• It can confuse users, who may not know which of the duplicate terms to select.

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Figure 17: The edit document properties window of a SharePoint library showing three different columns, each of which uses a different term set.

Figure 16: Reused term as it appears in Technical terms. Note that the icon shape for “A - Z indexes” is different from “Active Directory” and other terms that are not being reused.

Figure 15: Reusing a term. Here we are adding a term from the Publishing terms set (“A - Z indexes”) to the Technical terms set. The Reuse a term command doesn’t actually copy the term into another set. Instead, it simply exposes it in the auto-suggest list.

Managed metadata for different user scenarios

The SharePoint Term Store Man-agement Tool (Figure 6) gives tax-onomists the ability to support various tagging scenarios, such as:

1. A - Z index. In a technical manual, book, or journal, you want indexers to select tags from a specifi c controlled vocabulary as in Figure 1 above. The Reuse a term command can be used to expose a term from another term set without actually copying it in the Term Store (Figure 15).

2. A library of client project docu-ments. Users will need not only a local term set but also global term sets, such as geographic regions and products. There are two ways to accommodate this requirement.

In the first method, the client projects library administrator creates three managed metadata columns, each of which uses a different term set: Technical Terms, Geographic Regions, and Products & Services. This method is well suited to searching and report-ing, but the tagging process is more time consuming because the end user must enter values for three different document properties.

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Figure 19: After using the search feature in the Term Store Management Tool to fi nd duplicate terms, you can:

1. Delete terms, such as misspellings.

2. Merge terms, which exposes them in multiple term sets but eliminates duplicates in the list of tag suggestions. Content that has already been tagged with a merged term will not be updated, but it will be returned in searches for the term that is the merge target.

3. Move terms, which removes a term (and all its child terms) from its current location and copies it to another location.

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Figure 18: The edit document properties window of a SharePoint library showing a single managed metadata column called “Keywords.” Items in the auto-suggest list are drawn from a term set containing values from Technical Terms, Geographic Regions, and Products & Services.

3. People profi les. By default, the Ask Me About, Offi ce Location, Past Projects, Skills, Schools, and Interests properties in the SharePoint People Pro-fi le are defi ned as Enterprise Keywords. Values entered by users will appear in the System group in the Term Store Management Tool. As a result, some of the values may be duplicated in other term sets created by taxonomists. The Merge, Move, and Delete term com-mands can be used to eliminate duplica-tion in the auto-suggest list. The Term Store Management Tool search feature can be used to identify duplicate terms (Figure 18).

Same word, different meaningsYou don’t want to merge or delete

a term if it can mean one thing in one context and something else in another context. To allow users to use both meanings for tagging, you can use the Description property in the Term Store Management Tool to help users decide which one to choose. Users can see the Description when they hover the cursor over the term in the list of suggestions (Figure 20).

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How to plan global and local tax-onomies

I recommend a three-part strategy for planning global and local taxono-mies:

1. Get acquainted with Share-Point metadata features. This means reviewing the features that use meta-data (i.e., full text search, list/library navigation and search, content types, and rules) as well as the Term Store Management Tool.

2. Sketch out high-impact busi-ness work flows. Identify the business objective and the tasks required to ac-complish it. Who are the primary users? Who are potential users in related and unrelated domains? What content and experts are required? What metadata is needed to find, discover, summarize, and report data?

3. Create a pilot SharePoint site and do some user testing. Populate at least one library with the required content. Identify some expert users and make sure their user profiles contain information about their skills, interests, and experience. Add some metadata to the Term Store and use it to add properties to SharePoint documents and images. Devise a simple test plan and observe three or four users as they work through it. Use feedback to create a production site.

Keep in mind that SharePoint has some limitations. It can handle synonyms (“see” references) but not related terms (e.g., “photovoltaic ef-fect” see also “solar power”). You can’t create custom relationships (e.g., Company A was acquired by Company B). You can import terms, but you can’t export them, and you can’t interface an external thesaurus with the SharePoint term store without third-party software.

That said, the metadata capa-bilities of SharePoint 2010 are a great improvement over previous versions. With the proper planning, information professionals can design a SharePoint environment that increases work group productivity, not only for primary users, but also for others with an occasional need.

The Montague Institute Review is published by the Montague Institute and edited by Jean Graef.

© Copyright 1998 - 2015 Jean L. Graef. All rights reserved.