Editor's note: In my experience, organisations often talk about reaching the holy grail of data interoperability but may not know how to achieve this. Luckily, Yonah has loads of experience of working with complex, rich data and vocabularies, and making systems talk to each other, so she was ideal to cover this topic. It is not just a matter of setting up the systems or of mapping individual data fields or taxonomy terms. She also discusses the invaluable business skills needed to make everything run as smoothly as possible.

Introduction

Welcome to my chapter! Throughout my career, I’ve implemented change. The changes range from process updates and improvements to system updates and new system implementations. No matter what the changes were, data was involved. This chapter focuses on what to consider when developing approaches and solutions in taxonomical work, especially where vocabularies and systems need to talk to each other.

Thoughts as you read this chapter

• • What's the best approach to facilitate the sharing of metadata between multiple systems?

• • What are the data sources for each system?

• • What are the data targets?

• • What metadata needs to be shared? All of it? Some of it?

• • What systems should be integrated with each other? How?

Your organisation has a database that is the central source of assets and their data, which traverse in and out, typically from multiple sources and going to multiple targets. How do those assets go in and out of the system?

What kind of information is exchanged for each transaction? It all comes down to metadata and workflows and ensuring that there are systems in your organisation to hold and manage this data.

Each system in an organisation is its own database of information and assets. In an ideal world, each system has the same metadata fields and controlled vocabulary values as other systems in the organisation, as well as externally.

The reality is that the metadata fields in each system differ, sometimes with just a few nuances here and there, while the names of other metadata fields vary widely. When the metadata field names differ, interoperability issues will exist.