Taxonomy design and metadata management

Spark Trajectory Intranet and Digital Workplace Skills Matrix > This skill is in the User experience design domain

Skill description

Skills related to the creation, implementation and maintenance of metadata schemas to support retrieval, navigation, personalisation and information interchange. Includes classification system design, and the use of AI to suggest, evaluate and govern taxonomies at scale.

Version 2 skill
Provenance related

Taxonomy design and metadata management skill levels

Apprentice

Supports taxonomy and metadata efforts by applying established categories, tagging content using controlled vocabularies, and maintaining basic metadata compliance. Understands how classification supports search, retrieval, and findability, and follows guidelines for terminology and metadata consistency.

Practitioner

Develops and manages taxonomies and metadata schemas across multiple domains. Ensures terminology alignment, ontology consistency, and proper metadata tagging for both structured and unstructured content. Coordinates with content owners and system teams to embed metadata governance and supports semantic search, retrieval optimisation, and translation alignment.

Master

Oversees enterprise taxonomies across systems and languages. Integrates AI techniques such as concept extraction and semantic modelling. Leads governance of automated classification.

Skills related to Taxonomy design and metadata management

AI, search and retrieval management
Information architecture
Localisation

Other skills in the User experience design domain

Accessibility
Brand management
Information architecture
Interaction design
Localisation
Taxonomy design and metadata management
User research
User testing
Visual design

Errors? Disagreements? Omissions?

We have hopefully created this competency matrix with thought and care. It is not the only competency framework in the world, and relates specifically to the intranet and digital workplance profession. It therefore concentrates on some things and ignores others.

If you find an error, disagree wholeheartly or feel there is a glaring ommission we'd love to know.

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License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.