Terms and Term Synonyms

A taxonomy is a formal classification system. A taxonomy groups the words, labels, and terms that describe something, and then arranges the groups into a hierarchy. To find out more, click here.

A Term Set is a group of related terms and within Atlas, there are 5 core Term Sets:

• Department
• Location
• Subject
• Entities
• Activities

To create and manage terms, you must be a contributor, a group manager, or a Term Store admin. These permissions for the Term Store are separate from your permissions to Atlas workspaces.

Why use Synonyms?

The taxonomy search only looks at the term from the first word used within the term set and there are no partial or second word search capabilities. For example, as a content manager I would like to search for the cancellation trade mark which is in the Activity term set:

• *Activities*
  • Trade Marks
    
    • Cancellation (trade marks)
    • Classification (trade marks)
    • Licensing (trade marks)

If I type "trade marks cancellation" into the tag field when creating content via Add It, I will only see the "Trade Mark" term group as the search is only looking the first word entered which is in this case is "trade". If I type "cancellation" into the tag search this will display the "cancellation" term.

However, synonyms allow you to find the term in multiple ways. Adding "trade mark cancellation" and "cancellation (trade mark)" to the synonyms field on the term store will then allow the term to be found when searching both "trade mark" and "cancellation". You can see this example configured below:

You should be aware that if you use In Focus Filters the terms will be displayed by their original label not by any of the synonyms. However if you use translations and your browser is in a translated language you will see the translated terms in the In Focus Filters.

Synonyms are not Indexed by Search 

When searching for content using a text search box, for example from an Atlas Listing page, you cannot use the synonyms to return the content, you can only use the default label. Therefore this feature is intended for content creation rather than for retrieval.

Additionally, as term translations are treated as additional synonyms only the default language term will be searchable when using a text search box.