The three terms provide:
The three terms turn an inherited folder structure into searchable meaning
Semantic Search with Managed Metadata
SharePoint Managed Metadata provides a controlled vocabulary that describes what a document is about, independently of the words that happen to appear in the document.
For the prototype, three Term Store concepts provide the semantic structure:
Centre · Region · Activity
Existing folder names can be used to automatically assign these terms to imported documents. A document therefore acquires structured meaning as part of the migration process rather than relying solely on its filename or text.
Those three dimensions can then be combined when searching and filtering:
Region = Atlantic
Centre = Halifax
Activity = Training
This behaves more like a structured search engine than a word match. The user is asking for content associated with those concepts. The documents do not all need to contain the words “Atlantic,” “Halifax,” or “Training” for them to be found.
The result is a simple semantic foundation:
Legacy folder → automated metadata assignment → Centre / Region / Activity → semantic filtering and search
And there is no separate indexing project required. In SharePoint Online, the content and its metadata are:
“crawled and indexed automatically.”