Taxonomies and Ontologies

The terms “Taxonomy” and “Ontology” are often used inter-changeably and are often confused. However, the terms to express different concepts.

• Taxonomy is about classification, and so represents “Is-A” relationships. For example, in the zoological world, a domestic cat (“Felis catus”) is a member of the family “Felidae” which itself is a member of the order “Carnivora”. Such taxonomies are typically, but not always, hierarchical. An object can exist simultaneously in many different taxonomies. So, a cat also belongs to the group “predators”, which would also include the insect “praying mantis”.
• Ontology is about the concepts and relationships that can exist for an object or a group of objects[1]. For example, the “Part-Of” (“Part Holonym” [2]) relationship is used to describe the parts of a car (a wheel is part of a car). Therefore, a taxonomy is a type of ontology by this definition.

SharePoint 2007 introduced the managed metadata service to allow the definition of taxonomies to be used for classifying items and documents through metadata columns. Companies are encouraged to define their own or use industry standard taxonomies for classifying documents across the organization to ensure standardization and improve searchability.

Less work has been done in integrating ontologies within SharePoint, although progress by a number of third-party software vendors is being made. “WordNet” [3] provides a rich source of generic ontological information using the English language, and codifies many types of relationships between nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs using “cognitive synonyms” (synsets). Vertical market ontologies are now being built, such as for financial governance by the “GRC3 – Governance, Risk and Compliance Competence Centre” at the University of Cork, Ireland (http://www.ucc.ie). Integration of such ontologies in SharePoint will be the next step in improving search, leading to the possibility of useful question-answering systems.

[1] What is an Ontology? http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/what-is-an-ontology.html

[2] Speech and Language Processing, Jurafsky & Martin, 2nd Pearson International Edition p.653

[3] Princeton University “About WordNet.” WordNet. Princeton University. 2010.  http://wordnet.princeton.edu 

My SharePoint Sites and “Members” Group

The “My SharePoint Sites” links facility is designed to provide quick and easy access to all sites to which you are member:

This facility is very well described in the blog post Overview of My SharePoint Sites and how the data is populated by Jerry Orman.

Sites in which you are a member are included in the list. What does “member” mean? In the simple case, it means that you belong to the group
designated as the “members” group for the site.

When you create a site and choose unique permissions you can specify a new group for site members. You can also change the “Members of this site” group through “Setup Groups for this Site” or create another members group:

Now, what’s strange is that it is the group “Project N Members” that is deemed to be a “members” group when it is created as a “Members of this Site” group and regardless of how and where it is used in the future.

Therefore, if you use this dialog to select another group that was not created as a “Members of this Site” (say “Project N Visitors”), the site will not appear in the “My SharePoint Sites” list.

Conversely, if you select “Project N Members” as the “Visitors to this Site”, the site will appear in the “My SharePoints Sites” list.

Note that when editing a group you do not get an opportunity to set the “Is Member” flag. However, if you look at the “Groups” table in the content SQL Server database you’ll find a “flags” column. A value of “0” means the group is a “Members” group, and “1” for other groups:

Please note I’m only showing the SQL Server Database table for illustration. Please do not modify the table contents directly.

Creating While Loops in SharePoint Designer Workflows using Stateful Workflows – Part 2

Here’s some additional information to this post about this subject.

An alternative to our solution for while loops in SharePoint Designer workflows have been previously proposed based on setting a workflow to start when an item is changed. This gets over the problem of how to get a workflow to restart itself (which we do with the “Restart This Workflow” action). You can find a description of how to do this here: http://sharepointmagazine.net/technical/development/the-dog-ate-my-task-use-sharepoint-designer-to-email-daily-task-reminders

However, the technique of a workflow restarting itself when an item changes will not work with SP2. Take a look at this Microsoft post:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepointdesigner/archive/2009/07/13/service-pack-2-prevents-an-on-change-workflow-from-starting-itself.aspx

In SP2 a workflow cannot restart itself recursively, and so this will break stateful workflows written in this way. Seems strange that Microsoft would introduce a breaking change when using these techniques have been well documented.

Creating While Loops in SharePoint Designer Workflows using Stateful Workflows

For an update on this topic please see this blog entry: https://nickgrattan.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/while-loops-in-sharepoint-designer-workflows/

Amongst several significant limitations with SharePoint Designer workflows, perhaps the most important is the lack of looping. Therefore, expressing processes like “while not approved, rework” becomes difficult.

We have published a paper that describes how to implement while loops by emulating stateful workflows in Microsoft SharePoint Designer. You can download the paper here (PDF, Oct 2009). The technique uses our “Restart this workflow” custom action, which is part of our “Custom Activity Pack” which can be downloaded here for free.

Update: 10-Nov-2013. Source code and WSP now available in GitHub: https://github.com/NickGrattan/NGCCustomActivities.git

Custom Workflow Action: Send to Records Center

Our Custom Activity Pack contains actions that can be installed for use in Microsoft SharePoint Designer workflows. The latest version includes an action for sending documents and items to a Records Center site collection directly from your workflows.

The Custom Activity Pack is free and can be downloaded from GitHub: https://github.com/NickGrattan/NGCCustomActivities.

Other custom actions in this pack include:

• Start Workflow – Start another workflow for the item or document and return.
• Call Workflow – Start another workflow and wait until that workflow has completed.
• Halt Workflow – Halt another workflow executing against the item or document.
• Restart This Workflow – great for implementing stateful workflows in SharePoint Designer
• Is Workflow Running – check if another workflow is running against the item or document.

Here is the entire list of actions:

Metadata, Default Values and Required Columns

To improve the quality of metadata associated with documents it is advisable to make columns required:

When applied to “Choice” types, the first choice from the list is automatically selected. Thus the user is not forced to make a choice, and the likelyhood is that the correct value will not be selected.

To circumvent this problem you can set a calculated default value that sets an empty string as the default value. This is an equal sign followed by two double quotes:

Now, when a new item using this field is presented to the user a blank item is selected. If the item is added without supplying a value an error is presented:

Amnesia Problem: Multiple Content Types on Libraries

Update Oct 30 2009: Here’s a solution to this problem.

There are many cases where you may want to have multiple content types associated with libraries. For example, a document library may be created for all documents do with a project. You may have different content types for project specifications, project plans etc. This can be easily done and is well documents. This results in multiple items displaying on the “New” menu, each of which can have different document templates and different meta data columns:

Now, when the user selects New + Content Type 2 the document template for Content Type 2 will be downloaded. So far, so good. Remember, though, that the document has not yet been created in the document library.

Once the document has been authored, the user will now save the document back to the document library, say with the name “document1.docx”. This is the point at which SharePoint suffers from amnesia. It has no idea that this document was created by the user selecting New + Content Type 2, and so when the document is saved SharePoint will use the default content type, which is “Content Type 1” in this case.

In many situations, this does not matter. However, when the content types have different meta data associated with them, or different workflows or policies, the document will have the wrong processing applied. This can have serious problems, especially when documents are passed to records management.

This problem can be mitigated to an extent by having required meta data fields – in this case the user will be prompted by the client application to provide values, and at this stage the user will have an opportunity to select the content type. Alternatively, separate document libraries will be required for each of the different content types – but this compromises your taxonomy.

 

Am I Serviced Packed?

You can find the current version number for MOSS 2007 through Central Administration:

• Run Central Administration.
• Click the Operations tab.
• Click Servers in farm under the “Topology and Services” section.

This shows the version number for the farm and each individual server in the farm:

Here are the version numbers for various MOSS 2007 service packs:

Unservice packed	12.0.0.4518
MOSS Service Pack 1 (SP1)	12.0.0.6219
MOSS Service Pack 2 (SP2)	12.0.0.6421

For a full list of version numbers, including interim builds see here.

Update: 5 Nov 2009: See here for how to find MOSS 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services version numbers.

Adding Styles to “Full HTML content with formatting and constraints for publishing” Columns

In this last post we looked at using “”Full HTML content with formatting and constraints for publishing” column types in lists and document libraries. When using this control, you can mark text and then select a style to apply:

You can replace this style list with your own styles. To do this, create new styles that start with “ms-rteCustom-“. These styles can be placed in the page itself (if only available for that one page) or in CSS files used by the page. For example, you might want to add a new style of the “EditForm.aspx” page for the list or library in which the Full Html Control Column is used. To do this:

• Using SharePoint Designer, open the “EditForm.aspx” page associated with the list or library.
• Add a style using the New Style … link in the “Apply Styles” pane, eg “.ms-rteCustom-MyStyle”.
• Save the file.

The style will be placed within a “<asp:content>” tag in the form:

Now, when the HTML editor is used, this new style will be available:

Note: The style list will only show styles when text is selected.

Using “Full HTML content with formatting and constraints for publishing” Columns in Document Libraries and Lists

You can easily add columns with the type “Multiple lines of text” to lists and libraries to allow rich text and HTML editing. However, the column type “Full HTML content with formatting and constraints for publishing” provides much better editing capabilities, including applying styles, table formatting and reusable content.

This post shows how to use this column type in lists and document libraries. To do this, you must first add a “Site Column” to the site using the column type “Full HTML content with formatting and constraints for publishing” and then apply this site column to the list or document library.

Note: You must activate the “Office SharePoint Server Publishing” feature on the site.

Here are the instructions:

• Select the Site Actions + Site Settings + Modify All Site Settings menu command.
• Click the Site columns link.
• Click the Create link.
• Enter a column name and select the “Full HTML content with formatting and constraints for publishing” column type.

• Click OK to create the column.

The site column can now be applied to a list or document library:

• Navigate to the list or document library.
• Select the Settings + Document Library Settings menu command.
• Select the Add from existing site columns link.
• Select the column from the site column gallery:

• Click OK.

Now, when you edit properties in the list or document library the full HTML publishing menu will be used: