Use Metadata Tagging to Expose Line of Business Information Directly Within SharePoint 2013 Site Columns for Business Intelligence Gathering - Blogging Thoughts on SharePoint and Office 365

Asif Rehmani included a demonstration of a 3rd party application, which automatically extracts metadata and adds it to SharePoint 2013 site columns within his presentation, “Building Composite Solutions for SharePoint 2013 with the Browser”. This 3rd party application is offered by Pingar. The App is called “Pingar Metadata Extractor” and is presently offered at no charge from the Microsoft® Office App Store.

It is important to note that this App provides “entity extraction” for 14 out of the box entity types. “Entity extraction” is Pingar’s proprietary method of tagging information with metadata, which, in turn, is suitable for sorting into sets (“entities”). When the underlying document repository is SharePoint 2013, these sets can be represented by site columns. As the description for the Pingar App notes, this free process will extract information, automatically, against documents and list information stored in SharePoint 2013 for 14 out of the box entity types. Further, Pingar provides an application programmer interface (API) which can be used to produce custom entity types over and above the 14 out of the box types, which may be required for organization-specific taxonomies.

Asif Rehmani notes that the Pingar App must be configured by users with appropriate privileges with the Term Store for SharePoint 2013. Once the App is configured, then site owners can certainly use the App to collect information via automatic metadata tagging of line of business (LOB) data located in SharePoint 2013. The process of applying this App to documents is simply a matter of clicking on the mouse and selecting “Pingar Metadata Extraction”.

Once the Pingar process has been selected, then the metadata tagging function is entirely automatic. The metadata is added to corresponding SharePoint Site Columns. The new metadata is then automatically exposed to the user by SharePoint 2013. Filter options for each new term are made available, which users can implement, as appropriate, to change how LOB information is viewed in SharePoint 2013.

The data extracted by the Pingar App is stored in the Term Store. For each Pingar “entity” a corresponding Term Set is created in the Term Store. Each piece of information relevant to a specific “entity” is stored as a term within the term set that correspondence to the “entity.”

Organizations intending to implement a method of collecting information in SharePoint 2013 according to a taxonomy should seriously consider the free Pingar App. Our last check of the App description indicated that up to 500 documents per month can be processed with this App at no charge.