Presentation Description
Date: October 25th, 2025
Venue: University of Barcelona, Spain
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Broad Topic: Information Architecture
Moderator: Francisco Carlos Paletta
Presenter: Joseph Busch, Principal Analyst, Taxonomy Strategies
Research Paper
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Presentation Script
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[Slide 1] Best Practices : Business Classification Semantics and Metadata to Support Risk and Compliance Use Cases
Joseph Busch, Taxonomy Strategies, Washington, DC, USA
[Slide 2] 1. Introduction
This presentation focuses on the use of business classification semantics and metadata to support risk and compliance use cases at the African Development Bank (AfDB), a multilateral development organization or MDO with the overall goal of sustainable economic development and social progress in African countries that contributes to poverty reduction. But the following use cases are also common for public and commercial organizations with public accountability.
- Compliance with access policies by classifying documents so that appropriate access rights are provided and enforced.
- Compliance with public disclosure policy so that approved versions of specified documents are made public and others are not.
- Compliance with records management policy for retention and disposition of documents.
[Slide 3] 2. What is a business classification scheme (BCS)
A business classification scheme (BCS) is based on business functions like finance, human resources (HR), and information technology (IT), as well as business process activities. Business process activities may be well-defined standard operating procedures like Procurement, HR, and in the case of MDOs a key activity is the operation of development projects. Other business processes may be less well documented and need to be elicited from process owners. A BCS is hierarchical with implicit inheritance of metadata properties specified at each hierarchical level. This diagram shows an example of a BCS. Note that the BCS may be linked to an enterprise resource planning or ERP system of record when it exists to support a business process activity.
Metadata should be defined to support the use cases. It should be automatically generated by business rules and other methods as much as possible, and only minimally entered manually. Metadata values should be managed vocabularies from authoritative sources such as reference data from ERP systems of record as much as possible. Where metadata are not from managed vocabularies such as title and file name, they should be based on naming conventions or automatically generated from metadata components. The table at the bottom of the slide is an example of such a title and file naming convention.
[Slide 4]
This diagram shows an example of a BCS taxonomy. In this example, the Buildings, Facilities and Logistics function has a business process activity Buildings and Facilities and a sub-activity Lease and Sublease Management. There is an activity instance for a specific building under which documents related to the lease and sublease are filed.
[Slide 5]
Document types are genres that should be scoped by templates, meaning that there can be a template defined for the document type. Some document types may be generic such as correspondence or memorandum. More specific document types may be specified by Standard Operation Procedures or SOPs. Templates should include the appropriate metadata schema and business rules to populate the metadata values.
[Slide 6] 3. Sovereign Development Projects
One of the main activities of MDOs is planning and supervision of development projects undertaken by one or more countries. Each project (and indeed every MDO Activity) involves the creation and collaboration around different types of documents. For example, the AfDB has SOPs for sovereign development projects. This business process is divided into 6 distinct project phases—Programming, Identification, Preparation, Appraisal and Approval, Implementation Supervision, and Completion or Cancellation.
One method to facilitate collaboration in document management is the development of templates that standardize the form, structure, and metadata of key document types such as the reports that are generated in conjunction with each phase of the development project lifecycle as shown in this slide. A template related to a specific type of report can be associated with the specific phase in the project lifecycle when that type of report is generated, and specific metadata and metadata values can automatically be filled in based on this context.
Classifying development project documents using the BCS will guide the user to the Activity Instance. The development project Activity Instance ID could be used to query the ERP system of record and retrieve related metadata associated with the project such as Project Name, Project Manager, Region, Country, Sector, Sub-Sector, etc. as shown earlier in slide 3. The same principle could be used for other business process activities such as finance, procurement, and human resources that have an ERP system of record. In these cases, there could be different standard identifiers used to query and retrieve related metadata associated with the Activity Instance.
[Slide 7] 4. Business value and security classifications
Classifying documents with the BCS enables compliance with records management policy for retention and disposition of records. Each Business Process Activity in the BCS constitutes a record series. A record series is a group of related records that can be disposed of together. The record schedule is a listing of all the record series with instructions on how long to keep them, when their retention period begins and ends, and their typical disposition. Disposition is the process of reviewing a group of records whose retention period has ended to determine whether they should be retained as records, archived to preserve their historical value to the organization, or destroyed.
Each Business Process Activity in the BCS has a metadata property that identifies the business value of the documents classified in that activity or record series. Each business value has a retention period associated with it (an example from AfDB is shown in the table). The Business Value and Retention Period are the metadata properties used to automate the disposition of record series in the records management application. This diagram illustrates how the Business Process Activity metadata in the BCS prepares the record series in the document management application to be disposed according to the instructions in the records schedule in the records management application.
[Slide 8]
Similarly, classifying documents with the BCS enables compliance with disclosure and access to information (DAI) policy. In the BCS, the security classification is initially set at the Function level. While the security classification is inherited hierarchically, it can be overridden at any level and further inherited. For example, at the AfDB all Institutional Legal and Agreements documents are classified as Restricted at the Function level, but a final signed agreement can be re-classified as Public when that is appropriate. The DAI level further distinguishes the Restricted classification into Confidential and Strictly Confidential. The default level for the BCS is usually Confidential. At the AfDB, the level for personal identifying information (PII), investigations, and Board Committee documents is Strictly Confidential.
The DAI class and level are the metadata parameters that identify the appropriate disclosure series in which a document belongs (an example from AfDB shown in the table). A disclosure series is a group of related records that can be disclosed (or restricted) together. The disclosure schedule is a listing of all the disclosure series with instructions on what document status changes and other events provide the triggers for automating the appropriate disclosure of and access to the items in the records management system. The diagram on this slide illustrates how the Business Process Activity metadata in the BCS prepares the disclosure series in the document management application to be disposed according to the instructions in the disclosure schedule in the records management application.
[Slide 9] 5. Summary
This paper discussed best practices for business classification risk compliance. I discussed how a BCS taxonomy inherits metadata and populates metadata properties hierarchically. I described how the BCS taxonomy includes the retention label and the security classification that ultimately applies to documents in the document management system. I explained how this automates the record disposition and disclosure of certain records as mandated by organizational policies. When reference data from ERP applications such as SAP, managed vocabularies, and naming conventions are used metadata values will be consistent and population of metadata can be largely automated.
Integrating a BCS with document management facilitates compliance with records management and disclosure and access to information policies. It also increases the association of usable metadata with documents, which reduces errors by providing more reliable search results, and overall optimizes staff productivity.