Merging

When you merge two concepts or concept schemes, you’re deleting one and moving its property values to another. For example, let’s say you have a concept with a preferred label of “Caribbean” selected on the concept hierarchy, and it has a scope note value of “Does not include Greater Antilles”. To merge it into the “West Indies” concept, transferring the property values to it, select Caribbean on the Concept Hierarchy and then select Merge into concept…” from the gear menu at the top of the form. Enter “West Indies” in the dialog box that displays and press Enter.

When you are finished, the Caribbean concept will no longer be there, and the West Indies one will have a scope note value of “Does not include Greater Antilles” (if it didn’t already) as well as any other values formerly assigned to Caribbean. Also if Caribbean was used by some other vocabulary (including transitive imports and usages in Tagger graphs) then those references there are also updated. One exception is the Caribbean concept’s preferred label value of “Caribbean”, which instead of becoming an additional preferred label for “West Indies”, will become a new alternative label for it, because a concept should not have two preferred labels in the same language.

From version 5.2, merge also has a transitive side-effect such that if Concept A is merged into Concept B and A was used by some other vocabulary (including transitive imports and usages in Tagger graphs) then those references there are also updated.

Note

  1. This does not happen for working copies because by default they are not committed, so the changes cannot be propagated.

  2. The changes to other graphs will not show up in the change history.

Replacing the ID (URI) of an asset will move all information about it that exists in the current asset collection to the new ID. This includes any references to the asset. If no other collection refers to this asset then this operation will effectively delete the “old” ID. However, any information about this asset contained in other collections will continue to refer to the “old” ID. You should proceed with this operation only if all information about the asset is contained within this collection, or you understand the implications of this change and, if needed, are prepared to adjust other asset collections.