Concept: Why does each tag need an ID when importing a taxonomy?

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 IDs are required, which you may want to be aware of:

First, the IDs allow you to rename tags. If you create a taxonomy, tag several pieces of content with a specific tag, then 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 you uploaded this taxonomy and used it to tag content…

Then you fixed the spelling to create this new version:

… because the ID of the first tag is the same, 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.

Second, the IDs can be used to keep your taxonomy in sync with an external system.

For example, you could have an airports taxonomy:

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.)