June 2012 Global vs. Local Taxonomies in SharePoint

MONTAGUE INSTITUTE REVIEW

ISSN 1554-303X

June 2012 Global vs. Local Taxonomies in SharePoint

SharePoint 2010 lets you create metadata -- 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 SharePoint A 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" function. 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 factors influence whether metadata should be global or local: ownership and usage.

Ownership Owners are responsible for creating meta-

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

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

Sometimes, it's possible to use external metadata, such as the ACM Computing Classification 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.

Usage Usage 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.

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

Implementing taxonomies in SharePoint

The trick is to give users access to the information they need -- without 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 correctly 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").

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

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.

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.

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

3. Technical. This group contains 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 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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Term Store data structure The 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 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

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 specific 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.

Figure 6

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Regardless of who has permission to create and edit managed metadata, 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 permissions Term set permissions determine

who can create and edit controlled vocabularies 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 contributors, import term sets, modify the working languages for the term store, and edit terms. In our example, this is the global taxonomist (Jean Graef).

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).

? Group managers can add or remove 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, publishing, 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).

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.

? 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).

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.

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Regardless of who has permission 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 individual item can choose a tag value from the specified term set. Figure 11 shows how a specific term set is used to supply values for a new SharePoint library column ("field"). Figure 12 shows how values from the term set are exposed for user tagging.

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.

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 define 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 define a new library column.

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