mkroetzsch added a comment. @daniel: Have you wondered why XML Schema decided against changing their URIs? It is by far the most disruptive thing that you could possibly do. Ontologies don't work like software libraries where you download a new version and build your tool against it, changing identifiers as required. Changing all URIs of an ontology (even if only on a major version increment) will break third-party applications and established usage patterns in a single step. There is no mechanism in place to do this smoothly. You never want to do this. Even changing a single URI can be very costly, and is probably not what you want if the breaking change affects only a diminishing part of your users (How many BCE dates are there in XSD files? How many of those were already assuming the ISO reading anyway?).
Having a version number in URLs does not solve the problem of versioning: it just creates an obligation for you to change *all* URIs whenever you update the ontology. If you really ever want to make a breaking change to one URI, then you just create a new URI for this purpose and keep the old one defined as it was. Then you stop using the old one in the data. Clean, easy, and usually without any disruption to 99% of the users (depending on which URI you changed of course ;-). This introduction of new names is completely independent of your ontology document version. Besides all this, breaking changes are extremely rare. The example you gave (changing the meaning of an XML Schema datatype) does not apply to us, since we cannot do such things in our ontology. In essence, our ontology is just a declaration of technical vocabulary. Most changes you could make do not cause any incompatibility -- the Semantic Web is built on an open-world assumption so that additions of information to the ontology never are breaking anything. The only potentially breaking change to an ontology is when you delete some information, but even there it is hard to see how it should break a specific application. Summing up, the only breaking change to an ontology is to change an important URI that many people rely on. The current proposal is to introduce a mechanism for doing exactly this. TASK DETAIL https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T93207 REPLY HANDLER ACTIONS Reply to comment or attach files, or !close, !claim, !unsubscribe or !assign <username>. EMAIL PREFERENCES https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/settings/panel/emailpreferences/ To: mkroetzsch Cc: adrianheine, Manybubbles, Smalyshev, mkroetzsch, Denny, Lydia_Pintscher, Aklapper, daniel, Wikidata-bugs, aude, Krenair, Dzahn _______________________________________________ Wikidata-bugs mailing list Wikidata-bugs@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-bugs
