My colleague Connor Cantrell recently wrote a piece on taxonomy governance, placing it in the context of collection lifecycle management in libraries. One of the primary reasons for governance, whether of taxonomies, metadata, content, data, records, books, academic journals, or any other digital or physical information asset, is to ensure that it’s managed in a consistent and predictable way using standardized and repeatable processes. Of course this also means that someone needs to write those policies and processes down, and someone else (or even the original someone) needs to be able to find and understand them. Which brings me to the oft neglected, postponed, or flat-out ignored, but critical task of documentation.
Taxonomy documentation in an enterprise environment often consists of a large and dispersed set of documents, websites, collaboration tools such as wikis and message boards, and, of course, individual experience and expertise.