Metadata in SharePoint 2010 has been a huge topic of discussion. I have had some time to look into it, supported by articles such as Understanding SharePoint 2010 by An Introduction to SharePoint Managed Metadata. However, this article is more of a high level overview of what managed metadata is and a little bit less of how it is actually implemented.

Taxonomy

In SharePoint 2010, Microsoft has started talking about taxonomy a lot. Taxonomy is defined by Wikipedia as:

Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification.

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In addition, the word is also used as a count noun: a taxonomy, or taxonomic scheme, is a particular classification (“the taxonomy of …”), arranged in a hierarchical structure.

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It has its roots in subjects such as classification of living creatures such as plants, animals, etc.

The information architecture of a site consists of thing such as the navigational elements, site structure and taxonomy. Within SharePoint, you can also think of things like content types and site columns. The point of taxonomy in a website? Classifying a piece of information, such as an image or a page or even a paragraph of text into a certain category.

Metadata

A picture may be worth a thousand words – but not to a computer. To give an image context and make it possible for search machines to properly add it to their search indexes, metadata must be added. This is done in the form of having meta data fields available, such as a title, a description, the date the image was taken, etc. An image library in SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010 works along similar lines.

Tagging in a folksonomy

In a previous paragraph, I mentioned that taxonomy is classification of information and is part of the information architecture of a site.

One of the best examples of tagging has been implemented by the picture management site, Flickr. When you upload an image, you are given the option of filling in metadata fields such as the title and description of the image. Flickr also allows for “tagging” of images: adding key words that you think are relevant to an image. This allows you to decide which terms make sense for that image, without having to add them to your title or description. This also makes it easier for searches later, as the search machine knows what the most important words are.

Flickr is a “folksonomy” because users can fill in any term they like as a tag. There is no hierarchy, no structure and really – no rules. The definition of the data is created by the people. This works well in a very unstructured environment such as Flickr.

Tagging with managed metadata

SharePoint 2010 now allows for tagging. In theory, you could allow users to create their own taxonomy by allowing any tag they want to use. However, SharePoint 2010 allows for managed metadata – create a centrally defined hierarchy of terms from which users can choose when tagging information.

An example for defining the location of where an image was taken could be defined something like: Continent < Country < City. When adding the metadata, it would be easy to see which terms are available. A user searching for images could then filter the images by continent, country or city.

Technet lists the following benefits of using managed metadata, which can be contrasted with Flickr’s unstructured metadata:

A little bit more explanation about the static versus dynamic properties: in SharePoint 2010, if you change the metadata definitions, the changes are applied to all of the items that are tagged with that tag. Furthermore, if you combine two tags to form a new one, these changes are applied to all items – plus when you try to choose the old tag, SharePoint will automatically supply you with the new tag.

Conclusions

Admittedly, there’s a lot more to tell about metadata in SharePoint 2010, but I need to save things for other articles.

Managed metadata adds a lot of functionality to SharePoint 2010. I am very much looking forwarding to adding taxonomy to new projects and seeing how it works in the real world.

For more information, I can strongly recommend An Introduction to SharePoint Managed Metadata and SharePoint Taxonomy Hierarchy.

Tags: classification, folksonomy, managed metadata, metadata, SharePoint 2010, taxonomy