When designing an enterprise metadata schema, determining what not to classify is just as critical as selecting your primary terms. This is the essential principle of negative space in information science.
Organizations frequently design over-engineered, narrow, and deep taxonomy structures that collapse under the weight of their own complexity.
For example, during a recent agile infrastructure project for a client managing tens of thousands of distinct brands, we deliberately excluded highly subjective attributes such as “taste profiles” or transactional “packaging types.”
While those values seemed interesting to stakeholders, they failed to provide any practical discriminatory power for core system navigation.
Busch’s Golden Rule of Design: Keep your corporate vocabularies broad and shallow.
Focus tightly on universal, multi-faceted attributes—such as geography, time parameters, and explicit physical constraints—to ensure your systems remain easy to maintain and highly scalable.
– Joseph Busch
#KnowledgeManagement #ContentStrategy #FacetedTaxonomy #OrphanTerms #Platter