March 9, 2011 – Metadata seems to be the word of the year. Though it certainly is a key component of any document management system, there seems to be ambiguity around the appropriate use of metadata.
CMSWire brought this news to our attention in their article, “Document Collaboration and Metadata: An Unholy Alliance.” Document management systems covers a wide birth of features, including search, indexing, and metatagging. Metadata allows us to store more information about individual documents to help us understand them better, and ultimately search for them with assured findability.
Like most things though, it works only if used. Many users take a stab at it with a faint heart and leave many fields blank that could have been doors for future access. Many users create their own folksonomy using familiar terms, but again if it isn’t used consistently and with some sense of standards, it will fail in the end.
Machine assisted indexing against a solid custom taxonomy is the key to any document management system’s success.
Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies that can help clients generate ANSI/ISO/W3C-compliant taxonomies to manage your content.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
