Taxonomies in SharePoint

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 design and application strategy is definitely a challenge.

The distinction and overlap between metadata and taxonomies was the topic of my previous blog post, "Metadata and Taxonomies," and it is very relevant to SharePoint. Controlled vocabularies or taxonomies used to tag content are referred to in SharePoint as “managed metadata.” This designation is indeed accurate and fitting. Some, but not all, metadata is in taxonomy form (hierarchical structures), and in SharePoint it is managed/controlled in a central way, where permissions on who can change or add to the metadata terms may be limited to a smaller set of users than those who may tag content with the metadata. “Managed Metadata” is something you will hear about in documentation, but in the SharePoint application itself, what you want to work with its “Term store management,” grouped with other Site Administration settings under “Site Settings” (under the gear symbol in Office 365 SharePoint). Terms are grouped into “Term Sets” (top-term hierarchies or facets).

Questions to consider in taxonomy design in SharePoint include:

• To what extent will document libraries (virtual folders) be used to categorize content within a site, and would proposed subfolder names be better suited as metadata terms for tagging?
• Will the primary use be for filtering lists of documents in place, within an open document library, based on metadata selected for the various “columns,” or will the primary use be for refining search results, based on metadata selected in the left-hand margin refinement panel after executing a search?
• How many Term Sets should be created and how many and which metadata fields in total should display to the users, either in columns or as search refinements.
• When should a Term Set be a flat list and when should it be created as a hierarchy, and how deep should the hierarchy be?

Use of document libraries vs. metadata tagging 

 

SharePoint supports the creation of a hierarchy of nested folders within libraries within sites. So, it may be tempting to start of creating such a “taxonomy” of categories for content, especially if migrating content over from a shared drive where such folders had been used. However, tagged metadata has many advantages over categories of folders for finding and retrieving content.

A content item may be tagged with more than one term from the same Term Set if it deals with more than one topic or if it falls into more than one category type, whereas putting a document in more than one folder can lead to version control issues. (It’s true that you can put a document in one folder and a link to it from within another folder, but this is not easily remembered to do, nor does it look as “clean.”)

You can create Term Sets (as facets) each for multiple ways to categorize, such as by document type, function, audience, topic, etc., serving as facets, and then tag a content item with terms from each, whereas folders don’t deal well with mixed methods of categorization, and you are forced to choose one method of categorization.

• Tagged metadata allows you to filter a large set of content in place to quickly narrow results to what you want, whereas folders require clicking down through multiple paths, taking more time to find desired content, which is in different places.
• Tagged metadata can also be implemented as search refinement filters, also known as faceted search.
• Tagged metadata terms can have synonyms, helping users find what they want by different names, whereas folder names cannot have synonyms. 

Thus, what had been labels for folders on a shared drive should most likely be changed to terms in taxonomy Term Set. Whether you should have any document libraries, or just a few without subfolders, depends on the preferences of your users, but I don’t recommend the creation of subfolders. 

Filtering on columns vs. refining searches

 

The same Term Sets may be used for both column filters and search refinements. But typically, the implementation of managed metadata in SharePoint is either primarily for one or the other purpose, and the other use may not even be set up. Generally, if the managed metadata is going to be applied to documents within a single library or one site, on the order of tens or hundreds, then column filters are desired; if the managed metadata is going to be applied across multiple sites on thousands of documents, then search refinements would be used.

If unsure whether to promote filtering on columns or refinements on search, consider that filtering columns will always get more accurate results, but metadata has to be consistently applied.  Out-of-the-box search in SharePoint will retrieve documents with the word or phrase anywhere in the document. The idea behind this is to get search set that is larger than needed and not miss anything, and then the user can refine the search result with the various refinements. So, the results of search are not as accurate, but there will be results, even if metadata tagging is incomplete.

Knowing how the Term Sets will be used can have an impact on the wording of terms and the extent of use of hierarchy. Both columns and refiners have limited width for term names to display. The user can easily adjust column widths to accommodate long names, but the refinement panel width cannot be widened by the user. The use of columns also makes it desirable to keep terms to a limited length within a given Term Set.  Refiners indicate hierarchies of terms by default to the user who is searching content, whereas columns do not indicate any hierarchy in the default view.

Number of terms sets and metadata fields

 

There is no point in creating a Term Set if it’s not going to be displayed to the users for filtering or refining, and too many metadata fields take up horizontal or vertical space, are a burden to tag, and make the user experience of searching or filtering too complicated. So, you need to consider what would be truly useful, and not merely possibly nice to have. Just two Term Sets, such as Document Type and Topic, may be sufficient. In addition to the managed metadata that you create, there will be other metadata fields desired for filtering or refining, such as date, author, and format type, and perhaps uncontrolled keyword tags applied by users. In the case of columns, there will always be the document title taking up a column and considerable horizontal space as well. 

The default columns in SharePoint are “Type” (file format) “Name” (filename), “Modified” (the date the file was uploaded or the last time any of its properties were updated, not the date the file itself was modified) and “Modified By” (the person who uploaded the file or last updated its properties, but not necessarily who actually modified the file). The default search refinements are the same, excluding title: “Result type” (file format), “Author” (an even worse misnomer for Modified by”), and “Modified date” (often displayed in a graph form). If you believe such information is not that valuable, you can remove these columns/refinements, especially when you plan to add other columns/refinements, which will take up horizontal or vertical space. 

I would recommend no more than 4-7 total metadata fields, including those that are not based on managed metadata. You should avoid having more metadata as columns, along with the document titles, than can fully display horizontally, so as not to require horizontal scrolling. Search refinements, on the other hand, by default display sample high-use terms under each refiner, so typically no more than three refiners display in the left margin without vertical scrolling. Vertical scrolling is expected and acceptable to a limited degree.

Term Sets as flat lists or hierarchical taxonomies

 

SharePoint makes it easy to create hierarchies within Term Sets by simply right-clicking on a selected term and selecting “Create Term” from the context menu. Some people might thing that since the Term Store is for taxonomies, and taxonomies are hierarchical, hierarchies should be created if applicable. However, hierarchies are only helpful for navigating the taxonomy if the taxonomy is sufficiently large. If you set up multiple Term Sets, each used as a facet in combination with others, they each don’t need to be very large. Furthermore, the types of content most people store in SharePoint tends not to need extensively large and detailed taxonomies as might be needed in a content management system or digital asset management system

My rule of thumb is up to 12 terms should be on the same level before considering creating any hierarchy, but it could go up to 20 or so, and even more if the list of named entities/proper nouns.  Also, if you do have hierarchies, consider keeping them relatively shallow, such as to only two levels, instead of three. Even if a hierarchy is technically correct, it does not mean you have to set it up that way.

If you need only a short flat list of terms, you might consider not using the Term Store at all, but rather create the list as "Choice" type of column. This is easier to implement, but the terms would limited in their use to filtering and sorting the column, and could not also be applied to search and navigation.