Facets for Everyone: SharePoint and Metadata

December 5, 2009

SharePoint 2010 allows controlled term indexing and user-assigned index terms (uncontrolled indexing). You can find part done of a discussion of SharePoint 2010’s metadata support in “Managed Metadata in SharePoint 2010 – A Key ECM”. The method contains a number of different steps. That’s par for SharePoint, a software system designed to keep Microsoft
Certified Professionals busy billing. The more important points emerging from the write up are:

  • The facility to make controlled terms part of SharePoint can be useful. I wonder, however, however nested taxonomies can be imported via comma separated files. In my experience, correctly presenting categories and subcategories can be tricky. The sample taxonomy, according to the Web log post, was entered manually, and I will have to run some tests to determine if the CSV approach preserves relationships in the hierarchy of terms.
  • The procedure for supporting metadata strikes me as less sophisticated than what is available in commercial solutions and certainly far less robust than the professional tool available from Access Innovations
  • The mixing of user assigned terms and controlled terms selected from a list can lead to an indexing mess. Most people work from a small set of terms. Over time, documents are tagged with the limited selection of terms so that the result set is too broad. User selected terms fall prey to a similar problem. Users become habituated to a particular set of index terms. When working under time pressure, terms may be assigned by rote, not as a result of careful thinking about retrieval.

I am not a fan of mixing controlled vocabularies with  user assigned terms. Machine indexing has some problems as well. The Microsoft approach, if I understand this write up correctly, is to make any type of term indexing available. That type of promiscuous indexing creates big problems as the corpus grows. How are old terms replaced with more current terms? Not referenced, and this common problem is a deal breaker for some types of enterprise information access. Could this approach be amateurish?

Stephen Arnold, December 5, 2009

Oyez, oyez, African Development Foundation, I was not paid to point out the flaws of indexing without a plan.

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