When creating a taxonomy via import, or updating one via re-import, the “id” column is required. In addition, it must be unique for every row. There are two reasons why such IDs are required, which you may want to be aware of:.
Renaming tags
First, the IDs allow you to rename tags. If you create a taxonomy, tag several pieces of content with a specific tag, then When you upload a new version of the taxonomy where the tag with the same ID has a new value, all of the content that had the old tag will now show the new tag. Whereas if you change both the value and the ID of a tag and upload a new CSV, the old version of the tag will be deleted and removed from all content, because it no longer exists in the taxonomy.If the IDs are compared to determine when a tag has been renamed or deleted.
For example, if you uploaded this taxonomy and used it to tag content…
...
id
...
content in your courses:
ID | Value |
|---|---|
1 | Untied States |
3 | Candana |
Then you fixed the spelling to create this new version of the taxonomy, and re-imported it:
idID | valueValue |
|---|---|
1 | United States |
17 | Canada |
… because the ID of the first tag is the same (1), any content that was tagged with “Untied States” will now be fixed to show “United States”. But because the ID of the second tag has been changed, all instances of the “Candana“ tag will be deleted.
By keeping the ID the same (or not), you can control what will happen with new versions of the taxonomy - adding, renaming, moving, and deleting tags as needed. (Note that during the re-import workflow, you’ll get a chance to preview what changes will be applied before you finalize the update. That’s a good time to double-check that the right thing - rename or delete - is about to happen.)
Matching external systems/taxonomies
Second, the IDs can be used to keep your taxonomy in sync with an external system.
For example, you could have an airports taxonomy:
idID | valueValue |
|---|---|
ORD | Chicago O'Hare International Airport |
LAS | Harry Reid International Airport |
LAX | Los Angeles International Airport |
BOS | Boston Logan International Airport |
in this case, using the airport codes as the ID makes it easy to align the tags with other systems that reference airports, accounting for the fact that some airport names may be different (e.g. the Boston airport may be called “General Edward Lawrence Logan International Airport” or “Logan Airport”; the “Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas” was previously known as “McCarran International Airport”; etc.)
As another example, learning outcome standards often have IDs assigned to individual concepts. For example, the mathematics skill “Extend The Properties Of Exponents To Rational Exponents” has the ID “HS.N-RN.A.1“, which can be used to cross-reference it across various systems and publications. If you are creating a taxonomy related to learning outcomes, you can use these as the IDs.