by Angela Guess
Seth Earley recently argued that taxonomy is essential to master data management. Earley writes, “MDM promises not just greater control over consistent reference data; but an ability to manage the relations between data entities in order to generate more effective business knowledge. From this perspective, MDM requires an understanding and agreement about the meaning of terminology. Hence, the natural role of taxonomy. Taxonomy is about ‘semantic architecture’ – it is about naming things and making decisions about how to map different concepts and terms to a consistent structure.”
He continues, “One challenge to an MDM data architecture is ambiguity. The same term can have different meanings. Taxonomy includes mechanisms for understanding context and making meaning precise. Another challenge is consistency – it is also very difficult to get complete agreement on what terms to use or people will use terms inconsistently if given a choice (or prior to the effort, different terms were used and for various reasons the data could not be re-tagged). A thesaurus can map terms together to account for these inconsistencies. Taxonomies can also represent related concepts (technically also part of a thesaurus) that can be used to connect processes, business logic, or dynamic/related content to support specific tasks.”
Earley goes on, “Master Data Management programs need to leverage taxonomy and taxonomy should make use of MDM initiatives. Although taxonomy is typically applied to unstructured content, it is increasingly supporting structured and transactional content. Similarly, master data plays an essential role in making unstructured information consistent, findable and valuable.”
