To successfully capture the best possible results from an effort to implement metadata tagging for items stored in SharePoint document libraries, SharePoint administrators should have an understanding of what constitutes metadata in a SharePoint environment, the role of tagging, and how the process of tagging items stored in SharePoint document libraries works. Last, this understanding should be entirely consistent with Microsoft’s intention.
In our last post to this blog we referred to a definition of metadata and the function of tagging items as we found it on a Microsoft® website. In this post, we will refer to a couple of video tutorials available to any subscriber to SharePoint-Videos dot com. These videos include Managed Metadata and Term Store management.
As Wendy Henry, the author of our “Adding Metadata & Views to Document Libraries in WSS” notes in this video tutorial, “Remember, metadata is nothing more than properties, or attributes about other data”. So metadata, by itself, simply provides the specific category of information for the actual items it identifies within an unstructured set of data. As Wendy points out in her video, each of these categories of information correspond to a column within the document library example she presents.
Tags constitute the method of implementing metadata. This method is very apparent to anyone familiar with markup languages, including HTML, XML, and XHTML. Metadata can be found in the “head” section of almost any HTML document. Some of the categories of information, the metadata, to be found in almost any HTML document include the “Title” for the HTML document, the “Description” “Keywords”, etc. So, to follow this reference, “My first web page” would be the actual data categorized as a “Title” by a metadata tag in the “head” section of the code for a web page.
The two video tutorials noted here go a long way towards providing SharePoint administrators with useful information about metadata tagging in SharePoint 2007 and 2010.
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