Controlled vocabulary metadata, including hierarchical taxonomies, has been supported in SharePoint since its 2010 version, and its use and features have been enhanced is succeeding versions of SharePoint. While it’s not technically difficult for users to create taxonomies and apply their terms to content items in SharePoint, developing a metadata/taxonomy…
Category: Metadata
Metadata and Taxonomies
Metadata and taxonomies are related. In The Accidental Taxonomist, 2nd edition (pp. 15-18), I explain that most, but not all, taxonomies (not purely navigational taxonomies) serve to populate terms/values in metadata fields/elements; and some, but definitely not all, metadata fields are populated by terms/values from controlled vocabularies or, more specifically,…
Standards for Taxonomies
Since “taxonomies” are rather loosely defined, standards specifically for taxonomies do not exist, but there are standards that are relevant to taxonomies. A taxonomy is a kind of controlled vocabulary, and there are standards for controlled vocabularies. There are also standards specifically for thesauri, a kind of controlled vocabulary with…
Use Cases for Taxonomy Development
Developing use cases in the initial design of a taxonomy is something I did not learn about until I went into consulting, but it is a useful approach to taxonomy and metadata design in any circumstance, regardless of the involvement of an external taxonomy consultant. The use case technique comes…
Taxonomy Design for Content Management Systems
A very common implementation for taxonomies is in content management systems (CMS). The content managed in this kind of software can be diverse: office application files, PDF documents, image files, audio files, video files, and, in the case of web content management systems, also HTML and any kind of file…