Is an enterprise taxonomy necessary for managing enterprise records and information or is a controlled vocabulary sufficient for most organizations?

SharePoint Managed Metadata Question of the Week Each week we will be featuring an audience question from WAND's recent webinar, "Managed Metadata 101: Taxonomies and Tagging in SharePoint," and sharing the answer with our blog audience.

 

This week's question is: "Is an enterprise taxonomy necessary for managing enterprise records and information or is a controlled vocabulary sufficient for most organizations?"

A controlled vocabulary is a list of terms that may include synonyms but does not include any relationships between terms.  This becomes difficult to manage in cases where there are a large number of terms. Controlled vocabularies can be organized alphabetically, but eventually the size may make it difficult for somebody to find their desired term in the alphabetical list. This is where having a hierarchy can make a set of terms more usable and more easily manageable.