Is the Term Store Management Tool of SharePoint 2010 applicable for ontology development?

Friday, 28 January 2011 09:17

The Term Store is not positioned at Ontology development, solely partial thesaurus and taxonomy development. It doesn’t support any ontological features (classes, metadata on relationships, constraints and grammar etc) and taxonomy support is partial as there are no associative relationships.

We see the 2010 Term Store as a useful new feature of SharePoint in the sense that it is starting to introduce the valuable concept of a logical information model and controlled vocabulary within the content management system. From our perspective though, there are a number of areas of weakness with the current functionality, including:

• Support is limited to hierarchical relationships. There is no provision for creating relationships between terms that sit within different areas of the term store hierarchy. This creates distortions. For example, suppose you decide to have a geographical hierarchy of your corporate structure. This might include the EMEA region, with countries like Finland and Germany underneath. If you also want to have a hierarchy of your business partners and decide to model this by geography, you will need to insert the same terms (Finland, Germany etc.) in that hierarchy. A better solution would be to have a single hierarchy for geography and then be able to draw “associative” relationships, such as “has an office in” between the division or partner and the location.
• SharePoint allows terms to be duplicated in different Term Stores. We believe that uniqueness of terms should be enforced.
• The management of Term Stores is not as robust as we believe it should be for an enterprise-strength application. The distributed management model of the Term Store is not compatible with good governance. The purpose of controlled vocabulary and managed metadata is to implement information governance, but this is hampered without the application of principles dictating the lifecycle of the information model.
• The user interface is not suitable for the management of a large taxonomy – it is cumbersome to use.
• The Term Store is internal to SharePoint and therefore cannot be leveraged across the whole enterprise.
• The main weakness for us though is the disconnect between the Term Store and the metadata actually applied to SharePoint content. Since the Term Store can be used to drive influential metadata-based search features such as the Taxonomy Browser and the search result Filters, it is vital that all documents have complete and consistent metadata. Otherwise, when users are searching for documents, these features will actually hide information rather than bringing it to the surface. Documents without metdata will be automatically excluded from the search results. This is why we believe that automatic classification of documents against the terms in the taxonomy is absolutely vital.