13 - Implementing Taxonomies and Metadata: Lessons from a BusyNewsroom

Summary

Editor's note: It seems a little counter-intuitive that one of the top insights from Annette's chapter is that taxonomies are not interesting to many people you work with. But this need not be a problem; it just means that the taxonomy has to be implemented properly in order to make people's lives easier or products more attractive to customers. Annette is a seasoned pro working in a global news organisation and her insights are useful, no matter what kind of taxonomy work you are doing or where you are doing it.

Introduction

As a part of the Metadata Technology group at The Associated Press (AP), I work with a handful of taxonomy, metadata and data science specialists. Across our group on any given day, someone might be: managing our taxonomies or schemas; diving into news content to build a natural language processing (NLP) training set; diving into content metadata to inform updates to our classification rules; troubleshooting a classification tool problem; or designing metadata for a new editorial workflow. We juggle many projects at the same time and there is always something new to learn. My colleagues and I agree that we enjoy the fast pace and the wide variety of our jobs. What brings us together as a group, within the AP's larger technology department, is that everything we work on is related to news metadata.

In this chapter, we will look into some aspects of news metadata at AP, including what kinds of metadata and taxonomies we care about, where that metadata comes from, and how it is added to the content that we license and distribute. We will look at which practices lead to successful implementations that let AP's metadata keep pace with the demands of a 24/7 news cycle. Using examples from some recent system imple-mentations, my goal here is to identify some broader tactics and principles that are important for any successful metadata programme.

Who is The Associated Press and what do we do?

The Associated Press is an independent global news organisation dedicated to factual reporting, that supplies news in all media formats to our members and customers around the world. It was started in 1846 as a way for five New York City newspapers to share the cost of bringing home news of the Mexican-American war.