Atlas Term Sets and Taxonomy - An Introduction

During this article we will look at and explain the Atlas Taxonomy and its accompanying term sets; what they are, what they do, and the best way to leverage these for your organisation and wider knowledge management practices.

This is a high level overview and introduction to taxonomy and how it applies to Atlas. If you have already had your IA and Taxonomy workshops with us and want a refresher or more specific guidance, you can read the following instead: Taxonomy principles

What is a Taxonomy and how does it work?

Wikipedia defines Taxonomy as:

"...the practice and science of categorization or classification
...in which things are organized into groups or types."

Originally used in life sciences, particularly biology, the first official taxonomy was created by Carolus Linnaeus in 1758, who drew up rules for assigning names to plants and animals and identifying groupings based on shared characteristics, although Aristotle had attempted to classify organisms into defined groups almost exactly 2000 years before this - but that's enough history for one day!

Today, we are defining Taxonomy as:

"The organisation of search tools and systems that will help people complete tasks,
find what they need and understand what they’ve found.​"

The Atlas Taxonomy will group terms, also known as labels or tags, into a classification based on 5 core top-level 'term sets', which each contain sub-term hierarchies. This Taxonomy, when applied to content, will help drive the quality and sustainability of Atlas, as well as best practices when it comes to information management, which will all help reinforce a positive user experience on a day-to-day basis and increase ROI by slicing through confusion and poor information governance which if left unchecked will inevitably increase over time.

Metadata

"Metadata is a set of data that describes and gives information about other data."

Think of a clothes shop accessed via a website - I'm sure we have all purchased an article of clothing online, however this example can be applied to any website selling a variety of products. On this clothing website, you find many types of clothing but in this scenario you only want to find (search for) a specific pair of jeans based on some pre-known factors (or requirements).

The company and the website will often use metadata to assist you in narrowing down your search in real life by allowing you to refine your search results using a series of pre-configured options or "tags".

In this scenario, you want to find a pair of size 12, bootcut jeans. We can break down this additional information in the following way:

Clothes Category = Jeans
Type = Bootcut
Size = 12

This will give us an accurate list of results which match the criteria.

This example can also be applied to shoes - you need trainers, in white, size 8, from one manufacturer or brand only. You take the world of clothes, and you refine what you need against some already known existing categories and options (e.g. type, color or size). The clothes website will also have pre-configured pages which refine searches (think clothes type, season, featured, gender, sales, etc) by leveraging metadata.

In the same way, we can break down metadata for knowledge documents into categories when looking for items in your digital information landscape. Let's say you want to find the most recent word document template from the Marketing Department:

Department = Marketing
Document format = word document
Document type = template
Last Modified = within the last 3 months

Sort by = most recent first

Many out-of-the-box solutions do not provide a full range of refiners for metadata as part of their functionality. This is where the power of Atlas term sets come in, but before we delve into the detail, let's look at some other important aspects of the Atlas Taxonomy.

Microsoft Termstore

The SharePoint Termstore acts as the vehicle which houses the Atlas Taxonomy and is a SharePoint out-of-the-box tool. In our example of the clothes shop, the categories of Clothes Category, Type and Size would be stored here. The 5 core Atlas term sets we are about to detail are deployed to, created in, and managed from within the termstore, and will be used to apply metadata to your workspaces and content in the form of tags.

Tagging

​Using the terms within the termstore, you can tag content with its appropriate metadata to ensure additional information and context is provided to the document via those tags. This allows the content to be searched for and refined; not only by the system through pre-configured search pages and directories but also by users in user-centric searches.

Each workspace during its setup (in Atlas ConneX) will have some default tags included, which will be applied automatically to any content uploaded to that area. Of course, the user can alter these tags or add additional ones if they need to provide additional context to their specific content. You can also provide granular levels of tagging in subfolders to ensure that no matter where you add content, it will have appropriate tags automatically applied to that file, saving the user time and helping to automate information governance. This is one of the core benefits and unique features of Atlas.

​These terms and concepts appear frequently in articles about Managed Metadata. You can learn more about managed metadata here Introduction to managed metadata - SharePoint in Microsoft 365.

Atlas's 5 core Taxonomy Term sets

There are 5 taxonomy classes or core term sets in Atlas that will be applied to all content via mandatory fields (technical jargon = SharePoint columns linked to managed metadata fields). Your full existing taxonomy should be collated, split and retrofitted to reside within these termsets. And if there's a specific scenario which calls for it, we can even produce additional core termsets too as all the Atlas technology in the back-end will work dynamically.

We'll look at each one of the five core terms in turn.

• Departments
  • Defined as the departments, sub-departments and teams, etc in your organisation. These should already be known and be well defined in terms of established organisation hierarchy. Some common examples may look like the below:
    • HR
      • Recruitment and staffing
      • Compensation and benefits
      • Training and development
    • Finance
      • Accounts Payable
      • Accounts Receivable
      • Book keeping
      • Audit 
    • IT
      • Infrastructure
      • Service Desk
      • R&D
      • QA
    • Operations
      • PMO 
      • Project Delivery Groups
      • Project Assurance

• Location
  • Defined as where you work or where your work takes place, such as as physical office locations AND projects, operations and/or customer geographical locations. Common examples may look similar to the below:  

• • • Office Locations
      • Europe 
        • Spain
          • Barcelona Office
          • Madrid Office
        • UK
          • London Office
          • Manchester Office
      • Africa
        • Egypt
          • Cairo Office
    • Project Sites
      • UK Sites
        • Birmingham
          • Birmingham New Street
          • Birmingham Cinema Complex
        • Wigan
      • Spain Sites
        • Alicante

• • Optional - Legal jurisdictions. These are incorporated as considerations which can impact someone’s work, project or document type. There are predefined ISO accredited legal jurisdictions available to include all of or cherry pick from. 
  • Some larger clients may also list all continents and countries of the world or at least the ones which touch their operations. We say this as we are yet to engage a client who needs 'Antarctica' as a location term, but with scientific research being undertaken there it isn't out of the question when logistics or legalities are involved. Some clients prefer to include it, however others prefer to keep their list as concise as is needed. We tend to favor the latter approach for simplicities sake - the term 'Antarctica' can always be added on the fly when it becomes needed.

• Subject
  • This term set represents the Intellectual Property (IP) of your organisation, often containing terms to define Knowledge Topics, SME Areas, disciplines or niche topics used by your organisation.​ Some examples may include more generic or sector-related business subjects and usually the sectors or technologies themselves. Technical taxonomies (i.e. for legal or construction) will also reside here.
  • Subjects are usually not bound by time constraints, and will have no defined start or end point.
  • They can be quite high-level, for example:

• • • Sectors
      • Residential
      • Commercial
    • Consulting
    • Risk
    • Ethics
    • Legal & Compliance
    • Geopolitics
•  
  • Or they can go very in-depth, presenting many more tags for granular tagging. We'll look at some examples from a technical Tax taxonomy which goes down to 5 sub-levels. Technical Legal Taxonomies may look similar

• • • • Income Tax
        • Employment Income
          • Benefits
          • Allowable deductions
        • Self-employement income
          • Basis periods
          • Trading reliefs
            • Capital allowances
            • Business premises renovation allowance
      • Corporation tax
        • Property Income
          • Leases
          • Expenses
            • Interest
            • Repairs and renewals
          • Reliefs and allowances
        • Chargeable gains
          • Exemptions and reliefs
            • Rollover relief
            • Negligible value claims
          • Chargeable assets
            • Land and property
              • Leases
              • Transactions in land
            • Shares
            • Distributions

• Entities
  • Entities could be external organisations, such as customers, partners and suppliers, but they could also be internal entities, such as groups, sister or parent companies or even head offices.​ These may include, but are not limited to:
    • Customer names
      • Client A
      • Client B
    • Sub-contractors
    • Suppliers
      • Building Supplies
        • Supplier A
        • Supplier B
      • Office Supplies
        • Supplier A
          • Supplier B
    • Partners

• Activities
  • Internal or external activities (jobs, projects, tasks,...) are usually defined by a time span or time sensitivity, such as projects or taskforces. You can define activity by type, and also insert project codes for ease of search against your internal guidelines.
    • Activity Type
      • Bid
      • Matter
      • Lease Agreements
    • Engagement
      • Projects
        • PR001 - Project A
        • PR002 - Project B
    • Internal Projects
    • Supplier Engagement 
    • Social activities
      • Webinars
      • Blogs
        
        

How these term sets and tags are used within search

When the taxonomy is applied to Atlas, users can see and filter against used terms from within each term set. As an example, if we look at Department from within an Atlas search page, a drop down list of departments allows the user to refine the content being brought back to them. Users can also type in the filter to bring back related results which saves further time.

Best Practice for Atlas Taxonomy

• Keep the Taxonomy sets simple to start with and use fewer terms if possible.
• Terms can always be moved, merged or renamed if needed. Taxonomies remain live and are very much a moving target, so do not try to create the perfect a fixed Taxonomy - it will inevitably have to change as terms are introduced. For example, your organisation may adapt and enter new markets or adopt new technologies, products, processes or working practices, creating an influx of new terms not previously anticipated.
  • COVID 2019 and flexible working is always a good example we refer back to, where the macro-environment changed everyone's taxonomies. WFH became a new term and was tagged to new policies and guidance, whilst Health and Safety policies were updated and had a COVID tag applied.
• Apply your “corporate taxonomy” within the “Atlas core term sets”, and make it relatable to your business, using terminology an end-user will understand.
• Consider what sets of terms may need to be common across the whole business, and where you will allow areas of the business some flexibility.
• ​Within the core term sets, create logical hierarchies – but try to keep it to 3-4 levels below the global term.
• Do not try and receive input and sign-off from every business stakeholders as they will likely have no context to the task and will put up resistance or unnecessary effort and detail. Move forward with the main structure and concept, and add terms needed as you go.
• Only two or three individuals should have admin access to the Atlas terms in the termstore, and the sets and structure should be carefully managed with proper governance to reduce mishandling. After a few years of wildly inputting terms the structure can be lost, duplications identified and the overall quality of information management reduces.
  
  

Consistent Challenges

• We often find the trickiest area of defining your Taxonomy within Atlas comes in defining which terms go into Subject and which go into Activity
  • For example, take the term 'survey' - this could be a document type (i.e. survey results, or survey templates), or it could be a subject covered, or, it could even be an activity when undertaking building/construction surveys. Often there is no wrong answer here, but the guidance on time span is a key factor, otherwise it comes down to which makes the most sense for your use, however, we do advise not to put survey in all 3 as this will lead to duplication, confusion and ultimately the wrong context will be applied.
    • Training is the same, and can be training material (information type), training exercises (activity) or training as a wider subject (subject/IP).
• Unfortunately we are unable to change what the core Atlas term sets are called, for example we cannot rename 'departments' to 'divisions' or 'teams'
• Terms can always be moved merged or renamed if needed, but must be centrally managed. If a user needs a new term, we usually advise they submit a ticket to IT, or even better - they raise a 'feedback' item within Atlas for a new term and it's sent to your Atlas platform owner to insert, manage, and generally be aware of.
  
  

Need more assistance?

If you have any queries or would like additional support, please contact your closest ClearPeople or Atlas representative.