When to Design a New Taxonomy for a New System

Often organizations determine that a suitable time to adopt a new taxonomy is in conjunction with adopting a new system for its implementation, such as a content management system (CMS) or digital asset management system (DAM). They can budget taxonomy design and development services as part of the consulting services needed for the content migration and system implementation project, and they can improve and optimize the taxonomy for its new implementation and use.

There is the question of timing, though. Recently, a prospective consulting client asked me whether the new taxonomy should be developed prior to the selection and implementation of a new system or afterwards. Ideally, both the taxonomy project and the CMS or DAM adoption can happen simultaneously. However, the design and development of a taxonomy takes less time (typically 3-4 months) than the adoption of a new CMS or DAM. Altogether, a system selection, with a trial or a proof-of-concept project, implementation, data/content migration, and user training, can take 6-18 months.

Benefits of Taxonomy Development Prior to System Adoption

The primary benefit of developing a taxonomy prior to system adoption is that you can make it a system requirement that the new system supports the taxonomy that you have designed to best serve your users, your desired tagging method, and the nature of your content. These criteria should take precedence over designing a taxonomy to fit the requirements (or limitations) of a CMS or DAM.

Over time, your organization will adopt other systems, and the taxonomy should be suitable for multiple systems, rather than being system specific. Especially if you have an enterprise (enterprise-wide) taxonomy as your eventual goal, designing your ideal taxonomy first should be your approach. If one system cannot take advantage of all features of your taxonomy, another system may. There are also usually development work-arounds to get the full use out of your taxonomy.

Benefits of Taxonomy Development After System Adoption

A CMS or DAM has a variety of functions, and tagging and retrieval of content with a taxonomy in only one of those functions. Workflow management, rights management, authoring features (for CMS) and image/video editing features (for DAM) tend to matter more than taxonomy use among the requirements for a system. You can make “good support of taxonomy management and tagging” a requirement for your new CMS or DAM without getting into the specifics.

Adding features a taxonomy (such as polyhierarchy, related-concept relationships, end-user scope notes, different sets of synonyms/alternative labels to support each tagging and searching) if the system you later adopt does not support them is a waste of time and resources. It’s better to wait until a system in selected and implemented before fully designing a taxonomy.

Iterative Taxonomy Design Approach

When implementing a new taxonomy with a new system, the ideal approach is to spread out the taxonomy design and development tasks over the phases on the system selection and implementation process.

You should consider basic taxonomy requirements early in the system selection process. To do this, you might categorize different taxonomy support features as essential and nice-to-have. The method of tagging (automated, manual, automated with human review, and a mix) needs to be determined as both a system requirement and as a factor in the design of the taxonomy.

Then during the lengthy process of system testing and selection, information-gathering work for the taxonomy may take place. This involves stakeholder interviews, user focus groups or brainstorming sessions, content analysis, and review of existing/legacy taxonomies and other controlled vocabularies. Draft versions of portions of the taxonomy, without all features, may be created and reviewed, prior to the system selection decision.

After the CMS or DAM is selected and is in the process of being implemented the taxonomy design can be refined with features that the new system can support, and then the taxonomy can be fully built out. The new taxonomy can also be tested in the new system for its suitability for tagging and retrieval, and final enhancements are made based on the test results. The documentation of the taxonomy, including guidelines for its maintenance (a governance plan), should be started early in the taxonomy design process, but additional system-specific documentation is created after the new system is implemented.

Taxonomies for Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Taxonomies, with their origin in thesauri and library subject heading systems, have traditionally been associated with the tagging and retrieving of text content. The management and retrieval of multimedia content (images, video, audio, or other graphics files), on the other hand, has traditionally been served by metadata schema, reflecting the various attributes of the content, including digital rights. 
Metadata for text content has become increasingly important to make it “structured” and easier to manage. Meanwhile, taxonomies, with their richness in topical detail, hierarchical structure, and synonyms, have become increasingly important in making multimedia content, especially digital assets, easier to identify and retrieve.

However, the features and uses of taxonomies and descriptive metadata have somewhat converged, now that faceted taxonomies have become common. A facet is an aspect or attribute, by which the user may limit, filter, or refine a search or initiate a search selection. (Several of my past blog posts discuss facets, including "Customizing Taxonomy Facets.") 

Why taxonomies for multimedia content and digital assets

There is considerable overlap between multimedia content and digital assets, although they are not identical. A digital asset is something that is created and stored in a digital form that has value. The word “asset” implies it has value. So, not everything that is in digital form is an asset. Creative works in digital form, whether by in-house producers or licensed, are considered digital assets. Multimedia content tends to have value, so it tends to be considered as digital assets. If it needs to be managed and made available for retrieval and reuse, it can probably be considered a digital asset. If it needs to be managed and made available for retrieval and reuse, then assigning metadata and taxonomy terms is probably important.

1. Growing volume of digital assets

The main reason to move beyond simple controlled lists of terms/values in metadata properties (such as Type, Location name, Location type, Event/Occasion, Person type, Season, etc.) and include relatively large topical taxonomies for digital assets is to provide the ability to better limit search results in large volumes of content. The number of digital assets owned or managed by organizations has grown immensely, as varied media sources have become more common, not just for brand content but also for marketing, instructional, and technical content. Limiting search results from only a few broad topic categories is often not sufficient, and too many digital assets are retrieved.

A taxonomy provides further granularity of subjects which a digital asset depicts or describes. A granular hierarchical taxonomy could provide the terms for a single metadata property, such as “Subject,” or there could detailed taxonomies in more than one metadata property, to also include “Activity,” “Product category,” or “Occasion,” depending on the use case.

2. Varied audience for digital assets and the use of synonyms

Another reason to use taxonomies for digital assets is to better suit a varied audience of users. While it is digital asset managers who rely on metadata to manage the digit assets, various other users need to find the same assets: product and brand managers, web content editors, art designers, partnership and licensing specialists, and perhaps even customers. Assets are most valuable when they have wider uses, but in order to be reused by different people and departments, a detailed taxonomy helps.

A taxonomy is not only more detailed than a list of a few categories, but it is also usually enriched with synonyms (also called alternative labels or variant terms). This way, different people who may describe the same thing by different names will find the same concept and its tagged content. For example, synonyms could be “Bridal” and “Wedding”; “Infant” and “Baby”; “Botanical” and “Plants”; “DIY” and “How to.” Internal users and external users often have different preferred names for things.

3. Connecting both text and multimedia content across the enterprise

Applying a taxonomy to tag digital assets can also allow digital assets to be retrieved along with other content, text content, in other content management systems (CSMs). This would require that the taxonomy be a centrally managed enterprise taxonomy, and not just a siloed taxonomy within a single DAM system, and that more than one system are connected to each other (such as through APIs or integrations) or that a dedicated front-end enterprise search application is linked to content in their source repositories.  

While users often look only for digital assets that they know are located within a specific DAM system, other times users want to conduct a more exhaustive search on a subject. While most images and videos are expected to be in the DAM, along with some PDF files, other PDF files, presentations, and documents, and even some images and videos from other sources may be located in other systems. Taxonomies that can be linked to each other or a single master taxonomy managed centrally in a dedicated taxonomy management system, such as PoolParty, serving as "middleware," connected to the content in each of the systems, can enable comprehensive search and retrieval across the organization, especially if all the data is managed in a knowledge graph (explained in my last blog post "Knowledge Graphs and Taxonomies").

Tagging or keywording multimedia content and digital assets

Finally, there is the tagging component of taxonomies, which is often called keywording with respect to images. Digital asset managers must assign descriptive metadata to the assets they manage, which is not difficult if the controlled lists of available values are short. A taxonomy, however, may be large, so it can be a challenge to determine which subject terms to tag. 

For text-only content, the technologies of text analytics, including entity extraction and natural language processing, can be applied to enable auto-tagging. Image, video, and audio content had previously been considered unsuitable for auto-tagging, and thus less suitable for large taxonomies, but this is no longer the case.

There are new technologies and methods to enable auto-tagging of digital assets. Audio-to-text technologies enable transcripts to be created from audio and video files, and these texts can automatically analyze and tagged. Improvements in image recognition technology can enable images to be auto-tagged for their subjects. Human review of auto-tagging is still recommended, but that’s easier than tagging from scratch.

Taxonomy is what powers DAM

DAM systems do support taxonomies, so you should not hold back from creating a suitable taxonomy for your DAM content. To learn more about creating taxonomies for digital assets, attend the session “Taxonomy is What Powers DAM” on September 14, 2023, at the HS Events DAM New York conference. I will join three other panelists to discuss taxonomies for digital asset management: what taxonomies are, how to develop a taxonomy, how to do research for a taxonomy, and how to manage a taxonomy, especially for DAM applications. Register with the code SPEAKER100 for $100 off.

 

Digital Asset Management and Taxonomies

Earlier this month I attended a conference on digital asset management (DAM) for the first time: Henry Stewart DAM in New York, May 10-11. It revealed to me that the field of digital asset management is definitely an area where taxonomies are being applied and could be more even extensively utilized.

“Digital assets” refers to digitized content generally of images, video, and sound recordings, but could also be copyright text of publishers. As one speaker mentioned, digital assets are the intellectual property of certain enterprises, and hence the designation “assets.” The typical industries concerned with DAM are publishers, broadcasters, advertising (creative) agencies, and other media companies, which manage vast collections of media files. Additionally, large enterprises in any industry whose corporate communications departments manage sizeable collections of image or multimedia files are also concerned with DAM. The New York venue of this conference drew heavily on representatives of local media and advertising industries, but the annual fall venue of the same conference in Chicago, I am told, has a more diversified participation. The field is additionally defined and driven by vendors, digital asset management software products.

DAM is also a growing field. The 2012 Henry Stewart DAM conference in New York, its ninth year, drew an attendance of approximately 500, up from 400 the previous year. Last year, a new professional association was founded, the Digital Asset Management Foundation. A new quarterly journal from Henry Stewart Publications, Journal of Digital Media Management, just published its first issue this month. Also this month, the DAM Foundation and independent analyst firm, The Real Story Group, released a DAM Maturity Model, which provides a structured framework to address DAM implementation challenges.

As to where taxonomies fit into DAM, it’s not difficult to see. Digital assets tend to be structured content with various metadata fields (subject, purpose, format, location, copyright), which DAM software supports. Taxonomies (or more correctly, any controlled vocabularies) enable the consistent application of descriptive metadata. DAM software supports the inclusion of controlled vocabularies, but the tools to and especially the know-how to build the best controlled vocabularies/taxonomies is often lacking. Meanwhile, standard text search does not work on the non-text content that is typical of digital assets, so tagging and controlled vocabularies are all the more important.

DAM experts and consultants are not necessarily experts in taxonomies, and taxonomy experts may not be familiar with DAMs, so there is some learning for all of us. DAM systems, like other content management systems, often need to be configured, integrated, and customized for a specific enterprise’s use, with expertise and time spent first on system integration, pushing taxonomy design out to perhaps only an afterthought.

Taxonomies have various applications. I have been involved in taxonomies that tend to be either: (1) external facing, to allow customers or clients to search for content published by an organization, whether for research or for e-commerce, and (2) internal, as an enterprise or business taxonomy, to allow employees to find content within an intranet or enterprise content management system. A digital asset management system can manage content for either internal or external users, or often both at once. As such, designing DAM taxonomies often needs to take into consideration more varied users of the content.  This is certainly an exciting growth area for taxonomies, and I hope to be more involved in DAM taxonomy projects in the future.