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Metadata - defining the model for an Enterprise Class Solution

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Implementing an Enterprise Class Solution and Need to Define Your Metadata Model?

Enterprise Content Management has recently moved from being an application specific imeplmentation more into an infrastructure based implementation. Service Oriented Architecture and the services way of thinking isn't new, but has helped to move ECM into a more broad enterprise class offering.

Okay, so you want to implement ECM across your organisation and whilst there are many things to do, one of the key areas that will need to be properly defined is the metadata model. Metadata helps to describe or tag the content that is being stored and is a key enabler to finding content and for using content. For example, if I wanted to search for a customer documents on my ECMS then I might do this either by account number, or by customer name.

In order to develop a metadata model, it is important to use the right templates to collate information about the metadata. Upto now, many organisations have used spreadsheets to manage such models.

What I would like to do is understand from our contributors, are there any software tools for defining a metadata model? What have you used in the past? What worked well? What didn't work so well? I propose to develop a template that would be useful in defining the metadata model for an ECM system. This of course will take on board everyones experiences, so please contribute and make this piece of work a success.

Comments

Submitted by Daniel O'Leary May 18, 2010 - 9:48 AM

My strategy is a little different, but tends to work.

1)I look at individual fields / content elements- things like date, account number, first name FIRST, and define those.
2)See how they will be combined together into a template/ content type
3) Define exceptions
4) Ask people responsible for BPM, reporting, and compliance what data they MUST have, make sure that is included
5) Reevaluate- does this make sense to a new user? Can they be easily trained on this?

Th best part is, I normally start this process on white board, pacing, talking out loud, and inviting people to come look and collaborate on it. Once I'm done, take a picture with my camera, send to Evernote, and then start building it digitally.

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