This article outlines a practical suggestion for managing the use of categories and vocabularies in a way that prevents publication errors due to dependencies.
Resolution
When working within a site, a user may select vocabularies from both the current site as well as the global site. While this doesn’t pose an issue when creating content, it can cause issues when publishing.
For environments that utilize both global and local vocabularies, note that global vocabularies must be published to the live site through global site staging. One way to avoid confusion with vocabularies is to simply keep all vocabularies local or global.
If both must be utilized, this dependency issue may be resolved by ensuring that dependencies (like categories and vocabularies) should be published before publishing the site that depends on them (whether the dependencies are local or global).
Starting in 7.0, assets like tags, categories, structures, templates, application display templates, document types and dynamic data lists can also be shared by a parent to his child sites. In this case please ensure that the “ancestor’s” dependencies are published before the site in question.