Term Sets
A term set provides the container for terms.
Later in this chapter, you will see how term sets bind to managed
metadata columns in content types and lists so that users may choose
from a set of term values in a given term set for the data of a column.
- Create a new term group, per the previous section, if you have not already done so.
- Click the drop-down arrow on the Group node to contain a new Term Set.
- Click the New Term Set menu item.
- SharePoint displays the term set properties pane, like that of Figure 7.
Notice, when you clicked the arrow on the group
to create a term set, you had the option to import term set data from a
Comma-Separated Values (CSV) file. The Term Store Management Tool also
allows you to import a whole set of groups, term sets, and terms at the
top level of the term store. Importing data for your term store is very
powerful and a must-have feature when deploying SharePoint—it makes for
happier content owners if they do not have to type in lots of term
store data whenever you deploy a new SharePoint farm.
On the properties pane of the term set, you may
change the name of the term set and the description. The owner
(typically the person who created the term set) is the person with full
control of the life cycle of the term set. The term set owner and term
store administrators may make significant structural changes to the
terms in the term set.
Stakeholders are those users who receive e-mail
notification when the term set owner or term store administrator makes
changes to the term set. Imagine you have a body of people who want to
monitor the evolution of terms for a given term set—these people would
be the stakeholders.
The submission policy governs whether the term
set allows users to add new terms to the set from managed metadata site
columns. By default, SharePoint creates the term set as closed and
assumes the term set owner and stakeholders wish tight management of
the terms in the taxonomy term set. Toggling the policy to open allows
users’ and programmatic addition of terms in the set—edging more toward
folksonomy than taxonomy behavior.
The property to set the term set as “Available
for Tagging” tells SharePoint whether to show the term values in the
managed metadata site column UI when a user starts typing a term value.
The “Custom Sort” property allows the term set owner to custom sort the
order of the terms contained in the set—alphabetical order may not
always make sense to users for certain term sets.
Terms
Terms are the actual values used in managed
metadata site columns for the value chosen from a defined set—the term
set. For example, the term set might include terms for food such as
fruits. In the site, a user would see the list of fruits to choose
from, and the SharePoint user interface will limit the list of
available terms as the user types the first few letters of a known term.
SharePoint supports nesting of term values,
enabling the creation of a complete taxonomy of terms. For most, the
grouping and term sets, constituting the first two levels of the
taxonomy, followed by a list of terms in each term set, is enough for a
rudimentary taxonomy. However, with additional nested terms you can
create some quite elaborate taxonomies.
Figure 8
shows some term values I created by clicking the arrow on the right of
a term set and selecting the option to create a new term.
A term has an expected name and description
property, designated language, option for tagging, and other labels or
properties. The language property is important—term set owners may
designate certain term values for specific languages. For example, when
viewing the site in French, users would see a different set of term
values from users viewing the site in English.
The option to make a term available for tagging
allows the owner to determine whether a particular term value shows up
in the UI of choices for managed metadata site columns.
The Other Labels property provides synonym capability for the term. For example, SPS is a synonym for SharePoint Server. If a user selects the term value as SPS in a managed metadata site column, SharePoint understands that the value SPS corresponds to the SharePoint Server term.
