SharePoint 2010 provides limited metadata management in the form of hierarchical taxonomies that can be used to classify content. These terms lack any semantic relationship to each other meaning that it is not possible to navigate from one term to any related terms. For example although there may be taxonomies for services and locations it is not possible to define the locations where a service is available. Furthermore taxonomy terms are not indexed by SharePoint search, so it is not possible to find a concept rather than the content tagged with that concept. The reason why taxonomy terms are not indexed is that there is no page for a taxonomy term; this means that the SharePoint solution has no starting points or hubs to allow people to navigate the content in the way that they think.
Concepts for SharePoint integrates with the Web3 Platform to allow the creation of concepts with semantic relationships which are then exposed through the SharePoint Managed Metadata Service. This enables end-users to classify content against semantically rich concepts. In addition all concepts are published as web pages and indexed by SharePoint Search. The published pages are fully customizable and can display relationships to other concepts in the store and to content across the entire SharePoint site.