“Indecision clouds my vision / No one listens” – Faith no More, Falling to Pieces

A foundational tenet of taxonomy work is documenting decisions, including what the decision was, when it was made, who is acting on the decision, and who is ultimately accountable. The W3C standards and most, if not all, commercial off the shelf taxonomy and ontology management systems provide support for this documentation. Similarly, most enterprises have mechanisms for tracing what was done, when, and by whom.

I have seen firsthand the repercussions when taxonomy decision-making is not recorded or is not easily accessible as reference. Decisions are revisited, rehashed, and even repeated over the course of months or years. Changes to the taxonomy may be questioned and structures reverted to previous iterations in the course of taxonomy revamps.

Taxonomy decisions provide important context, particularly as AI finds more use cases within the organization. Proper decision documentation will become more important to serve user queries and ongoing taxonomy governance.

Documenting Decisions in the Taxonomy

One of the core principles of the W3C standards for semantic models is interoperability. As a result, taxonomy and ontology management systems adhering to the standards support the creation of self-contained models which can move between systems and retain their cohesion. Within SKOS, the skos:editorialNote, skos:changeNote, or skos:historyNote serve as free-text properties which can be used by taxonomists to capture why a decision was made. Since these fields are free text, a standardized way to capture information can assist with the reading and understanding of the contents. For example, structuring the note like “YYYYMMDD: Note text. – taxonomist initials” is a way to bring some sort of standardization to the field contents.

Common to most software platforms, history logs document what was changed, when, and by whom. These can be very important records to show what was changed in a concept record. What these logs don’t capture, however, is why something was changed. Cross-referencing changes between a history log and taxonomist notes in a note field can create a complete picture of any changes to a concept within a taxonomy.

The advantages of these combined documentation is that they can travel with the semantic structure as a complete package. The interoperable standards allow for the structure and the history of the structure to be delivered together.

Documenting Decisions Outside the Taxonomy

Documenting changes and decisions outside of the taxonomy serves several practical purposes. One, the sanctioned documentation tools of the enterprise can be utilized as they were intended with a taxonomy focus. Two, a wider audience can review and understand taxonomy decisions. Three, proprietary tools and formats are less likely to become a documentation and continuity issue if decision-making is recorded in more than one location.

Requests of any nature in an organization can be handled within a change request tool. Using one of these existing enterprise tools as part of the taxonomy governance process for additions, changes, or deprecations in the taxonomy is an easy way to build out a request process. These same tools often support comment threads, documents, and history logs so that the process to arrive at a taxonomy decision is fully documented. To provide full cross-referencing, the change request ticket number or URL can be documented in the taxonomy editorial note and the taxonomy concept URI can in turn be documented in the change request tool.

Additionally, it is not common that a wider business audience has edit or even read access to a taxonomy management system. Therefore, they do not have a view into the change decision-making process. Documenting changes in a change request tool (which, again, not everyone but the requestor may have access to) is one way to expose the decision process. Linking or embedding these change requests into other document locations—a text document, wiki, or communication email—can make the taxonomy change process more transparent to a wider audience. When decisions are made behind closed doors, intentionally or not, they are open to questioning. Fully transparent and accessible documentation helps to mitigate interrogating past decisions.

Finally, recording decisions in multiple locations may seem redundant, but this kind of duplicative documentation can, as noted, serve multiple purposes and audiences. Decisions are documented in slightly different ways and exposed to different audiences, but all to the same effect of recording the process and making it available to current or future users.

Contextualizing Decisions

As context graphs gain traction as a way to provide additional information about decisions, it seems to me that duplicating decision records in the organization, but connecting them in a way that includes a common anchor (the concept URI, the change request URL or other identifier, or even the URL of another document—though these are more vulnerable to change), can provide a single query point for taxonomy changes over time with context. Being able to query one or more sources of taxonomy change documentation opens up the ability to address the questioning of previous decisions. More importantly, these queries can thwart potentially iterating previously made decisions to avoid painful taxonomy reworks.

If a context graph can access the semantic structure and note properties, the history logs, the change requests, and any unstructured documentation, then a full portrait of what change was made, when it was made, who made it, and why it was made can be more easily accessible. Rather than running reports or searching across systems, a context graph can be prompted to provide the full change history of one or more contexts quickly and easily, maybe even within the course of a meeting in which a taxonomy change decision is questioned.

Following up on my last blog about endless taxonomy iterations, documenting taxonomy-related decisions can circumvent revisiting previously made decisions or even reverting back to prior taxonomy structures. The seemingly never ending churn around taxonomy structures can result in mistrust of the process or the value of semantic models. Carefully documenting decisions in multiple locations strengthens the governance process and mitigates reinterrogating previous well-reasoned, implemented choices.