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Enterprise Taxonomy Management

Governance

Define Workflow Processes, Controls, and Reports

Managing Governance and Workflow

Governance involves managing both human policies and procedures as well as system workflows and controls.

After defining user and group roles and permissions the enterprise should define the flow of work between groups and define domain and scheme-specific guidelines and rules. For example, a policy could be established that every candidate concept must be reviewed and approved by a Subject Matter Expert (SME) in addition to a senior taxonomy editor, or a policy could dictate that every concept must have a definition before it can be approved. At the systems level Graphite supports governance policies and procedures through three mechanisms:

  1. Custom governance properties and workflow controls
  2. Library of shared management reports
  3. Batch editor functions

Governance Properties and Workflow Controls

Graphite comes preloaded with a Governance template providing commonly used governance and workflow controls. Additional enterprise-specific controls can quickly be defined and added to any taxonomy scheme.

Illustration showing replaces/replaced by deprecation relationship, Yes/No toggle controls for key workflow states, comment fields for Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), Editors and Approvers, and a defined review date.

Sharing Management Reports

The ability to define, share and reuse standardized management reports plays an important role in the governance of enterprise taxonomies. Common reporting requirements may include workflow state reports, such as find all candidate concepts ready for QC review, and exception reports, for example find all concepts missing a definition or missing a mapping relationship to another scheme.

Graphite allows complex reports to be constructed using multiple parameters based on any combination of positive or negative values for workflow states or concept properties and relationships. Once a report has been designed it can be named and saved to a library of shared management reports.

Management reports are an essential quality control tool for attaining consistency in the content and format of controlled vocabularies. Saved reports enable workflow to be reviewed and exceptions to be identified with the convenience of a one-click operation.

Batch Editing

The ability to perform batch edits on groups of concepts enables efficiency and consistency in the management of enterprise taxonomies. Editors need to perform batch edits on ad hoc query results as well as results generated by a saved report.

Graphite allows any search results set or saved report to be batch edited. Following are examples of some batch edit functions that are supported.

  • Approve, Publish or Withdraw all concepts matching specified criteria
  • Reject all concepts failing to match specified criteria
  • Assign all concepts matching specified criteria to a different workflow state
  • Add or delete any property
  • Add or delete any relationship
  • Add or delete any collection
  • Set a review date

Batch editor controls supporting all common editing functions.

Governance involves managing both human policies and procedures as well as system workflows and controls.

Download the full Synaptica Guide to Developing Enterprise Ontologies, Taxonomies, and Knowledge Graphs.

This Guide covers Governance, Development, how to transition from taxonomies to ontologies and includes the Ontotext 10 step method to creating Knowledge Graphs.

Download the Synaptica Guide