#ASAE14

Moving from Files and Folders to

Tags, Taxonomies, and Meta-Data

for Managing Documents, Data,

and Information

Christopher Coogan (Deputy Director and Chief of Staff)

Kashif Imran (Chief Information Officer)

Association for Institutional Research

#ASAE14

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Hunting for a document on file share

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Hunting for a document in an ECM solution

organized using Metadata and Taxonomies

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Agenda

• What is ECM?

• Is there anything wrong with folders?

• Metadata

• Can folders and Metadata live together?

• Taxonomy

• Folksonomy and social tagging

• Questions?

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Enterprise Content

Management

(ECM)

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Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

• Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the strategies,

methods and tools used to capture, manage, store,

preserve, and deliver content and documents related to

organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the

management of an organization's unstructured information,

wherever that information exists. (Aiim.org)

• ECM is about “unstructured” information

– Images, office documents, graphics, web pages, email,

video, rich media

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Biggest single factor that triggered ECM

implementation now

http://www.aiim.org/pdfdocuments/IW_ECM_State-of-Industry_2011.pdf

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SharePoint as ECM Solution for Demos• Featurization of ECM features in SharePoint,

part of Office 365, simple licensing, single source for information, extensible, non profit offerings

• Document Libraries, Alerts

• Content Types

• Document Information Panels

• Folders

• Document IDs: ID follows document

• Document Sets: “Collection” of documents treated as a single entity

• Content Organizer: Rule based submission, Drop off library

• Document Center

• Site mailbox

Managed Metadata: Taxonomy, Folksonomy, Metadata Validation, Metadata Navigation, Tagging, Location based Metadata• Records Management, Record Declaration (In Place, Records Center)

• eDiscovery and Hold (In Place, Records Center)

• Information Rights Management: Encrypted documents

• Multi-stage Retention Policies

• Search

• Workflows

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Folders

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Is there anything wrong with folders?

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Why folders are bad?

• Rigid physical layout: put limits of physical objects

on items that are not physical

• Usability: Nested folders structure hides content

• Moving files across folders breaks links

• Sorting and filtering (across nested folders)

• Putability (Just create a new folder. “I’ll remember

where I saved it.”)

• Duplication to help findability (quality of being

locatable or navigable)

• Navigation

• The “F” word of Content Management

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A Folder Structure that Works

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Boss walk in your office at 4:50 PM

• I need all the contracts for more than $200,000 dollars.

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Metadata

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Metadata

• Data about data

• Collection of structured information about a document or a

piece of content (Patrick Lambe)

• Examples:

– Contract (Amount, Client, Contract Start and End Date)

– Invoice (Customer, Amount, Invoice Date)

– Project (Start Date, End Date, Title)

– Car (Company, Model, Year, Mileage, Color)

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Metadata on Amazon

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Metadata on cars.com

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Metadata on File Share

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Photo tagging and Metadata

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Google Docs and SharePoint

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Metadata in SharePoint Documents

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What is metadata used for

• Information Management

• Organize data by tags, alternative to folders: Findability

• Policy: records management polices act on metadata values

• Process: track state or status of business process, route

documents using content organizer

• Search

• Social capabilities

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DemoMetadata in SharePoint Documents

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Rules Based Submission

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Demo

Rule Based Submission

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Using Folders and Metadata Together

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DemoUsing Folders and Metadata together

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Taxonomy

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Taxonomy• Collection of concepts for a given subject

domain organized into hierarchical tree structure

• The hierarchy visually represents the nature of the relationships between the categories and sub-categories.

• Rigid, Controlled, Centralized, Carefully planned

• Help with Indexing, Retrieval, Organization and navigation of Information

• Folksonomy: loosely structured collection of terms (Community-driven - Twitter)

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Metadata Based Navigation

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Metadata and Search Refiners

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Demo

Metadata based Navigation

Metadata and Search

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Taxonomy VS File Share

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Managed Metadata Challenges

• Creating right taxonomies

– http://www.taxonomywarehouse.com

– http://www.wandinc.com/wand-general-business-taxonomy.aspx

• How much metadata?

• Ongoing governance

• Making users tag documents properly

– Manual Tagging:

• Compliance, consistency, correctness

– Automatic

• Fast, flexible, scalable, no user interaction,

• http://www.metavistech.com

• Wand Inc.

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Location based Auto Tagging

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Demo

Location-based Auto Tagging/

metadata defaults

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Folksonomy/Social Tagging• Informal list of ad-hoc tags or terms,

usually built over time through user defined keywords(Thomas Vanderwal: people’s taxonomy)

• Loosely structured collection of terms

• No hierarchy, flat set of terms/tags

• Community-driven (Twitter, #asae14)

• Issues: Misspellings, inconsistent use, maintenance, require cleanup over time

• Can be first step towards Taxonomy: Promote keywords to taxonomy later

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Demo

Social Tagging Documents

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Summary• Do not create folders unless you really

need to

• Use taxonomy and metadata to organize information and improve findability and putability

• Have a governance plan in place to evolve taxonomy

• Train users to get quality metadata tagged to the content

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Questions?

#ASAE14

Contact usChristopher Coogan

Chief of Staff

Association for

Institutional Research

ccoonga@airweb.org

850-385-4155 x124

Kashif Imran

Chief Information Officer

Association for

Institutional Research

Kashif@airweb.org

850-385-4155 x117