SharePoint 2010 Metadata and Taxonomy Management Overview
Guest Author: Stephanie Lemieux
I finally got around to reading the preliminary info on MSDN in regards to how SharePoint 2010 will be treating taxonomy and metadata. As most of you know, MOSS 2007 had some serious challenges in this regard that caused IAs like me much consternation when trying to implement effective content structures (e.g. no hierarchical metadata, no sharing controlled vocabularies across site collections, etc.).
It would appear that SharePoint 2010 includes many new features under the umbrella of Enterprise Metadata Management to solve some of these issues. Here are the highlights…
1. Terms & Keywords
SharePoint 2010 has a few types of vocabularies with different levels of control:
Terms: Basic construct – a word or phrase that can be associated with content. A term can become a managed term or a managed keyword.
Managed Terms = A controlled term that can only be created by those with appropriate permissions. Term sets (can also be considered taxonomy facets) are collections of related terms that can be hierarchically structured.
Managed Keywords = User-generated keywords (aka tags) kept in a non-hierarchical list called the keyword set.
What’s nice is that you can easily turn a managed keyword into a managed term, which essentially sets up SharePoint 2010 as a decent platform to blend taxonomy and folksonomy approaches (more on this later).
2. Managed metadata & the Term Store
Once you have managed terms in place, you can create a new column type called “managed metadata”. This column type is like the 2007 lookup, but points to the managed term sets instead of lists.
One of the biggest limitations of MOSS 2007 was the site collection boundary: lists were specific to a site collection, so in order to share metadata and taxonomy across multiple collections, you had to essentially reproduce the same lists in each collection.
Managed term sets (and managed keywords) now live in what’s called the Term Store Management Tool – a centralized database that allows term sets to be shared across a farm.
Term Store Management Tooi
Centralized metadata repository in SharePoint 2010
Image courtesy of http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2009/11/02/managing-metadata-in-sharepoint-2010/
3. Taxonomy & Metadata Management
Within the Term Store, there are some metadata and taxonomy management functions enabled, though the documentation is not clear on how many of them are achieved.
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Feature
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Comment
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Create or delete term sets
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Term sets are also known as facets
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Add, modify or delete terms
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it is unclear however how modifications and deletions are propagated throughout content that is already tagged – this is a big problem in 2007, as changes are not reflected in tagged content
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Arrange terms in hierarchies
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It would appear that this uses a drag & drop mechanism
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Define synonyms
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Unclear as to how this works and whether it is used in the search thesaurus
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Import terms
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Promote managed keywords into managed terms
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Great news for those of us who want to use tags as a source of candidate terms for the taxonomy
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Create multi-lingual taxonomies
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Unclear if this is at the term level or you have to create language-specific versions of each term set… likely the latter
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My biggest concern is the whole question of integrity and change propagation, but overall this is a huge leap forward from 2007 where there was no taxonomy management to speak of. This is actually more functionality than I’ve seen in many very expensive CM suites, so right now on the surface, I’m rather pleased with this set of features.
4. Tagging
I haven’t seen a screenshot of the interface for tagging from a hierarchical term set, so I’m still a bit in the dark on whether it’s a tree view or a panel pick list. But, Microsoft does point out that there is also type-ahead functionality for managed metadata fields, meaning that you can start typing and it will present suggestions from the managed term set, as well as show you the term’s position in the hierarchy (contextual placement). This is a massive improvement over the previous tagging, which was limited to flat pick lists – cascading lists were even a customization.
Type-ahead is also available for managed keywords, which is excellent in that it will suggest previously entered keywords as suggestions – encouraging cross-user consistency in tagging is always a boon. You can ignore the suggestions however and add a new keyword at any time.
Tagging interface for managed keywords
Image courtesy of http://www.endusersharepoint.com/2009/11/02/managing-metadata-in-sharepoint-2010/
Conclusions
Still a lot of details to discover about how a lot of these metadata and taxonomy functions behave IRL, but for now I’m secure in my assessment that Microsoft has taken a sizeable leap forward in fixing some of the ills of MOSS 2007 giving us taxonomy and metadata nerds many of the tools we need to create effective content structures in SharePoint 2010. Looking forward to seeing more as the beta program kicks off. If any of you have direct experience and more information to share, please do so in the comments!
I’ll post separately about my take on these functions and how they encourage hybrid approaches to taxonomy and folksonomy.
You can also read more about SharePoint 2010 in this CMS Watch report by my colleague, Shawn Shell.
This article was originally posted on the Earley & Associates blog.
Guest Author: Stephanie Lemieux
Stephanie has a Masters in Library and Information Studies (MLIS) from McGill University, specializing in knowledge and content management, taxonomy, and information architecture. For the past several years, she has been working on taxonomy & knowledge management contracts and research projects for a variety of clients.
I studied Stephanie’s previous writing on taxonomy (or “tagsonomy” as facetiously respelled by some authors) last year when doing a study for a client, and I found her arguments for having both a managed taxonomy and the freedom of a folksonomy compelling — and also remarkably well written.
It’s good to see that MS is perhaps finally getting it right. Two concerns remain, IMHO:
1. It takes non-negligible human time to review the folksonomy additions, fix the errors including
simple misspellings, and examine the terms added by users to promote some into the master
taxonomy. The way companies act, this will be seen as overhead and will often not be resourced.
Then the taxonomy will become a mess, and people will wonder why “findability” is not as
improved by the tags as was promised.
2. There are all sorts of KM systems, including learning management systems, employee
directories, etc., that require the same taxonomy. Does MOSS expose a service (through SOA)
that allows another application to query the taxonomy? Otherwise, an enterprise will still end up
having separate, uncoordinated taxonomies.
Thanks for the article, and keep up the excellent work!
Very helpful and well written. I hope to read more of your work.