Editing metadata for multiple resources at one time

As the number of resources you have grows it can be difficult to make changes to them and keep them all in sync. Fortunately data.world allows you to select and edit multiple datasets, projects, or catalog resources at one time. As with editing a single resource, you can edit multiples of any resource to which you have write permissions. The edits you can make are to the metadata for the resource--you cannot edit the data itself.

From an organization home page or one of the resource home pages (Data, Analysis, or Glossary), select:

If you start from your organization's homepage, by default the list that is displayed for datasets and projects is filtered to those owned by the organization:

If you come in from your Data or Analysis pages, the list shows all the datasets or projects for which you have edit privileges.

To the right of the +New button, there is a three-dot drop-down menu that you can select to edit multiple resources. From Data your only option is datasets, and from Analysis you can only choose projects:

There are several different resources you can edit in bulk from the Business terms tile:

On the Select screen is a list of the resources of the specified type with check boxes next to each item. Only resources that you have "write" access to will show in this list (the resources on the initial screen were all those to which you have either view or edit access). Select the resources you want to edit, and then click the edit button (lower right):

Though the options are different between the categories, once you have selected Edit Multiple...,, the process looks the same no matter what resource you are editing.

Each editing session has three parts:

To avoid confusion, only metadata resources with the same owner can be edited together. If you choose to edit resources with different owners, they can be edited in groups, but only groups with the same owner:

This restriction allows management of the impact of group edits.

The simplest data, which is included on every dataset is tags. Every dataset/project  has at least an "Overview" section which includes the ability to edit the "Tags" field. Additionally, when dealing with datasets, the user may choose to change the license type of multiple resource:

There are a few options when editing a field like this. Users can Add, Replace or Clear tags:

Many organizations, however, have more complicated metadata profiles, and allow for more complicated metadata to be associated with datasets and projects. When an organization has defined a metadata profile, then the edit interface will adapt to the profile. For a complicated organization, there may be many fields divided into various sections:

"Status" is a standard concept that organizations will likely use for their datasets and projects:

Other fields are simple text fields. In this case, you may either elect to not change the current value, or to replace the value entirely:

Some fields have complicated hierarchies of values. Those are often separated into their own section. In this case, the user can "Add", "Replace" or "Clear" the attribute:

Once you have set all of the values you want to change, click "Review" in the lower right. You will then be presented with a list of changes to confirm. At any point, you can go to a previous step to make changes. When you are satisfied with your changes, select Confirm ... changes.

If you made changes to different sections (e.g., those owned by yourself and those owned by your organization) the changes shown are unique to each section.

If you want to add tags to all resources in every section for example, you would need to make the change in each section.

Finally, you can choose to send email notifications to the admins of the resources you have changed. By default this option is off as a separate email is sent for every resource that has been modified.