Metadata Management is very one of the critical aspects of any organization. By managing its metadata, consistency of the information used across the various units and teams in an organization could be enhanced, thus facilitating the information to be more locatable.
Introduction
Metadata is additional information about other
data/artifact. Metadata is used to describe that artifact. This metadata
resides outside of the artifact. E.g. Author, Organization, Language, technology
to which that artifact is written by or belongs to, and type of the document
like white paper, training material, check list, etc. These are additional
information about the artifact but reside outside of the artifact and tell more
about the artifact.
The following points will cover in this document:
1) In what way the metadata can be
managed?
2)Real-world techniques for metadata
implementation.
Problem with the existing
systems
- Metadata
inconsistency:
If the metadata is not standardized, then there
is a possibility of inconsistent way of tagging data. For example, if an
application to fill in the field called Location, one person might fill as
INDIA, second as ASIA, third person as BHARATH. When somebody tries to get all
documents belonging to the location INDIA, he may not get the right set of
documents.
- Metadata
hierarchy maintenance:
For example, End user want to tag
one document to the test1 project in banking domain of xyz organization, so user can get
the document in result set with hierarchy; it is not possible in existing
systems.
- Free text
Metadata:
1) Existing system allows free text
without proper governance; it will make difficulty in search and comparing data
or content.
2) In SharePoint Server 2010 Search
relevance is improved as user inputs also get crawled and indexed while adding
metadata tags, in current system it’s not provided.
- Grouping
Metadata:
Metadata will be grouped to sub
units.
Grouping metadata will allow
managing metadata differently for different sub units,
Example: One organization having Sales department and
it is connected with both Company Global store and Purchase department So,
while searching for a particular term, all files associated with that term(both
Company Global store and Purchase department) are retrieved from the multiple
site collections across the web applications.
- Synonyms
Terms:
Synonyms are used to get terms in
search results in different way of wording,
For Example: SharePoint Services,
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, SharePoint Services 4.0, Windows SharePoint
Services 4.0 all these are different search keywords are used to refer to the
same term.
- Lack of
Search Administration Reports:
In SharePoint server 2010 there is
a provision for an administrator to actually view a graphical representation of
the searched keywords against the time taken for its retrieval.
In MOSS 2007 there is a limitation
of site collection boundary, In brief site columns are specific to the site
collection, so if any user want to share same columns (metadata and taxonomy)
across the multiple site collection the he have to create same columns in each
site collection. So it is very difficult when user need to update any column (metadata
and taxonomy), for this user need to update the columns in all the site collections.
To overcome such challenges; SharePoint 2010 has been
bundled with a new important feature called Enterprise Metadata Management
(EMM). EMM is a key building block in Enterprise Content Management and will
offer enterprise, management of metadata terms and content types for the
content management systems. This will permit the sharing of the metadata
taxonomies and terms in organizations across its multiple SharePoint websites
and site collections.
In MOSS 2007 there is a limitation
of site collection boundary, In brief site columns are specific to the site
collection, so if any user want to share same columns (metadata and taxonomy)
across the multiple site collection the he have to create same columns in each
site collection. So it is very difficult when user need to update any column (metadata
and taxonomy), for this user need to update the columns in all the site collections.
To overcome such challenges;
SharePoint 2010 has been bundled with a new important feature called Enterprise
Metadata Management (EMM). EMM is a key building block in Enterprise Content
Management and will offer enterprise, management of metadata terms and content
types for the content management systems. This will permit the sharing of the
metadata taxonomies and terms in organizations across its multiple SharePoint
websites and site collections.
Metadata in SharePoint
2010 is broadly classified into two types.
- Governance
Driven (Taxonomy):
In this terms are pre-defined by an administrator and are
centrally governed. We can say these terms are Managed Terms. A controlled term
can only be created by those with appropriate permissions. Managed terms can be
structured into a hierarchy and can be selected by the users out of the new
‘Managed Metadata’ column type. When a metadata column of this type is defined,
the user will be permitted to decide the metadata from the collection of
pre-defined managed terms.
- User
Driven (Folksonomy):
In this users specific to SharePoint 2010 items is going to
add words or phrases we can say these terms are Managed Keywords. By default
the managed keyword column is present. User-generated keywords (tags) are kept
in list keyword set, this is a non-hierarchical.
Case Study
Below
is the example of an organizational instance, where a user needs to enter in a
field called “Location” and the possible keywords are already available from
centrally governed keyword thus enabling classification and search easier.
i)
Create a Group (term) and Term Sets in the Taxonomy term
store
Creating
a Group (term) and Term Sets in the Taxonomy term store under the Managed
Metadata Service as below:
Group
name: TCS
Term
Sets: Locations and Unit
So, we here
are initiating the creation of a hierarchy level.
See the
below image:
ii)Create child terms for each term
By creating child terms, metadata across the organizational
applications is consistent.
i) Click on down arrow beside above created Term (Group).

ii) Create two child items like below, Location and
Units
iii)Create Synonyms for each term
It will help to improve search relevance
as their inputs also get crawled and indexed thus achieving greater scope for
end users to retrieve the documents with ease.
i)Creating a term under child:

ii)Creating term India under location

iii)Creating Synonyms
for term India

iv) Defining metadata column as a metadata column in a list
Defining metadata column as a metadata
column in a list(Go to any doc library and click on create column)

v)Assigning the right node from taxonomy
Assigining the right node from
taxonomy to the metadata column.
i)Select the Managed
Metadata option
ii)Assign the node
iii)Click
on Ok
vi)End user view of metadata column
i) End user view of metadata column

ii) Searching through Synonym, after entering ‘hi’ it is
showing India in search result, as we given ‘Hindustan’ as the Synonym in List.

iii)On Click on
picker to select it will opens the follwing window:

iv) After selecting the term:

References
i)http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee424403.aspx
ii) http://sharepointgeorge.com/2010/configuring-managed-metadata-service-application-sharepoint-2010-part1/