Implementing keyword tagging

Over the past year we had a team develop a new scientific keyword taxonomy (i.e. tags). These tags provide the relationships between our unique projects (for example, project related to the arsenic).

We are using these tags as a metadata field in our CMS and to support our new web search capabilities. We have not yet added them into our project tracking database and that's a next step.

The challenge we're now facing is consistency in using these tags by different users and in different (not integrated) systems. A final issue that we've tabled for the time being is the impact on existing products that use old tagging schemes.

We just had a meeting and came up with the following recommendations:

1. Project managers should only tag projects once for all systems
2. For consistency sake we need a gatekeeper to ensure that PMs are tagging projects consistently. The gatekeeper will review any changes to the keyword list.
3. We need to integrate entry of these keywords across all our systems. Entry can either be automated or manual by one person and we're now evaluating options

We've discussed and tried in the past more flexible/collaborative ways of tagging, without much success. Because so many of our products rely on structured relationships between projects, we need to ensure the consistency of use.