Taxonomy management

Transcript

In this video, we’ll cover how to create and apply tags to assets, and the importance of establishing a tagging taxonomy in AEM assets. Tags in AEM assets allow you to further categorize assets beyond their folder-based tree structure, to help you more easily search for and access the assets you need. Tags are created and managed in a hierarchical way, and this methodology is separated out from the organization of asset folders. Tags are applied to individual asset metadata to tie the asset to a defined taxonomy and classification, which means the asset can be grouped by, searched for, and referenced by a given tag. Let’s take a look at our Weekend Asset Collection as an example. Here we have multiple assets living across different folders for our adventure campaigns. It would be beneficial for our team to be able to quickly locate and access assets that relate to a particular season, but this taxonomical attribute isn’t quite important enough to actually organize the asset folders by season. Tags are an excellent tool for use cases like this. To manage tags, under Settings, go to Taxonomy Management. As you can see here, tags are organized in a hierarchical way. This tree-based organization structure makes it easy to classify and organize tags, and this easy-to-use interface also simplifies the process for users to locate and select relevant tags. Here, we’ll define a taxonomy for the seasons that our weekend content is associated with. The first level of the tag hierarchy is called the namespace, and it’s used as the top level of the organizational tree. Below the namespace is the tag hierarchy that can be as shallow or as deep as is needed. These tag trees under a namespace can even model sub-taxonomies, and we’ll demonstrate that in a moment. Let’s create a namespace for the weekend brand, and that will contain all of the sub-taxonomies that are relevant to the brand. Both namespaces and tags have titles and names. The title is the name that is displayed to users in AEM, and it can even be localized. The name is the underlying system name of the tag, and it’s what’s stored in an asset’s metadata when a tag is applied to an asset. Now that we have our namespace, let’s go ahead and start building out the tag tree to model seasons. This will allow users to group assets across AEM with specific seasons just by tagging them. Under the Seasons tag, we can build out the taxonomy further to cover fall, winter, spring, and summer. Then within each of these, we could drill down further to include the months within each season, if we wanted to get even more granular. It’s important to note that this entire taxonomy could be pulled up a level and out of the weekend namespace. That would mean season would become the namespace, and then the season and month tags are nested below that. However, if we go back to look at the weekend namespace, you can see that it’s also possible to create sibling taxonomies next to season for other categorizations like region, activity, or customer journey that would then all share the common weekend namespace. Which methodology is chosen is something that your content architect will have given some consideration to and will model depending on business requirements. Now that we have our Seasons tag taxonomy defined, it can be exposed to users in AEM via metadata schemas. This allows users to apply these newly created tags, and they can also see what tags have already been applied. Tag taxonomies are typically defined by content architects using model-controlled vocabularies that are used to manage the content in AEM. These taxonomies usually aren’t modified in an ad hoc manner at runtime, as AEM configurations and code can often rely on them. It’s also important to note that while tags can be moved or merged, it’s best practice to design a stable taxonomy where modifying tags in this way is the exception and not the rule. Similar to asset folders, the titles of tags are very flexible and can be changed at any time without a significant impact. Changing a tag’s name or hierarchy structure, however, is more complex and can have a significant impact to the AEM instance or application. Finally, AEM provides several out-of-the-box tag namespaces, and it’s best to leave these as is, as AEM uses some of them. For example, the workflow tags are used to tag AEM workflow models to determine which consoles in AEM they’re made available to. You should now understand how tag taxonomies can help you to further categorize and easily access your assets, as well as how to build out and apply tag taxonomies in AEM assets. Thanks for watching!