# Modifying taxonomic annotation from RESCRIPt

**URL:** https://forum.qiime2.org/t/modifying-taxonomic-annotation-from-rescript/21064
**Category:** Library Support
**Tags:** taxonomy, rescript
**Created:** [October 14, 2021, 9:12am UTC](https://forum.qiime2.org/t/modifying-taxonomic-annotation-from-rescript/21064 "2021-10-14T09:12:53Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 2

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### Author: ![SoilRotifer](https://forum.qiime2.org/user_avatar/forum.qiime2.org/soilrotifer/32/21071_2.png) [@SoilRotifer](https://forum.qiime2.org/u/SoilRotifer)
#### Post date: [October 14, 2021, 2:52pm UTC](https://forum.qiime2.org/t/modifying-taxonomic-annotation-from-rescript/21064/2 "2021-10-14T14:52:03Z")

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Hi @sln,

> [@sln](#):
>
> I have a small (!) concern regarding edit taxonomy.

Thank you for taking [edit-taxonomy](https://forum.qiime2.org/t/processing-filtering-and-evaluating-the-silva-database-and-other-reference-sequence-data-with-rescript/15494#heading--sixteenth-header) for a spin!

> [@sln](#):
>
> I am a bit scared to manually edit each single of them every single time I did a taxonomic assignment.

> [@sln](#):
>
> Do you think preparing a single search and replacement metadata file can be used in different projects or every time I got new data I should prepare a new metadata file to edit taxonomy?

I realized that I never explicitly stated the goal of `edit-taxonomy`. So, I added the following statement to the tutorial:

> **Typical use cases:**
> 
> - Edit the taxonomy prior to generating a taxonomic classifier.
> - Make taxonomy more "friendly" for plotting figures
> - Relabel non-official / un-accepted taxonomic labels, which are likely to cause confusion.
> - Truncate taxonomic names (_e.g._ based on a regular expression) so that the full lineage is not displayed in something like a heatmap.
> 
> - Or any other reasons we've not listed here. 🙂

If modifying the taxonomy for the first use case, there should be no need to edit the taxonomy each time you analyze your data. But it'd be a good idea to maintain / update your metadata file as you encounter additional mis-annotations. Then just use that whenever to make a classifier.

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