Associating with a Web Application
One of the options when provisioning a new
web application is to opt into the default farm list of managed service
applications, or allow the administrator to choose from available
services.
Recall from the procedure for provisioning a
new Managed Metadata Service the check box option “Add this service
application to the farm’s default list,” which, when checked, adds the
new Managed Metadata Service to the default farm list of available
services.
Note To
remove a managed service from the default farm list, use the Central
Administration Farm Association Page under Application Management.
Worth mentioning is the Managed Metadata
Service Properties page, which differs from the settings discussed in
the previous section. From the list of managed service applications,
click to the right of the name of the Managed Metadata Service Proxy
and then click the Properties icon on the ribbon. SharePoint displays a
dialog like that in Figure 3.
The first two check boxes tell SharePoint
whether this Managed Metadata Service will be the default for
Enterprise Keywords (folksonomy) and for term sets (taxonomy). Only one
Managed Metadata Service may act as default storage location for tags
of either type.
Access to the Term Store Management Tool from a Site
You might be wondering how to grant access to
the Term Store Management Tool to your content owners, without
providing them access to Central Administration. The good news is that
this tool is also available via sites in a site collection, as follows:
- Open the site collection.
- Click the gear icon.
- Select the menu option for Site Settings.
- Click the Term Store Management link under the Site Administration heading.
Taxonomy—Managed Metadata
Taxonomy is the hierarchical structure of terms
and terms sets, where a term is what SharePoint calls the definition of
“tag.” For example, “USA” might be a term identified in a term set
called “Countries.” This term set may likely
include other terms. When tagging content for specific country, users
in SharePoint may select the term “USA” to identify the content as
belonging to or originating from the USA. The term set “Countries” may
exist within a sub-hierarchy, perhaps under “Regions.” You can quickly
see how easily terms and term sets constitute a hierarchy, which is the
taxonomy. In Figure 2, the taxonomy hierarchy lives in the left panel of the Term Store Management Tool.
Whereas taxonomy is structured, and typically
predetermined by a term store or taxonomy administrator, folksonomy
evolves as users of a content management system invent tag names
(terms) for content. Folksonomy provides for only a flat and ad-hoc
tagging model, but it is effective because tags evolve as more users
participate in tagging of a piece of content. Tag clouds are a classic
example of folksonomy; they show the proliferation of certain tags
based on popularity. Clicking the Keywords node under System in Figure 2 displays Enterprise Keywords entered by users for folksonomy.
When working with managed metadata,
administrators and taxonomy administrators need to understand the
following components: term store, groups, term sets, and terms. The
following sections cover each of these components individually.
