Re: Versioning system for ontologies

Hi Alan,

What you suggest certainly provides a way of handling versioning, but in
many environments, the additional repository features seem to be
requirements. You almost always want to know who made a change, what the
change was, alongside other provenance information - and of course, make
this information machine readable (as opposed to a text note) seems
desirable for this community :P.

As I'm sure you're aware, when considering the quality and evaluation of
ontologies, identifying the state of an ontology throughout its lifecycle
also becomes quite important. Rafael S. Goncalves, Maria Copeland and their
colleagues provide an interesting set of analyses on how ontologies differ
through multiple versions [1] [2] [3].

Of tangential (but closely related) interest to versioning, people might
want to take a look at this year's Ontology Summit 2013 which focuses on
"Ontology Evaluation Across the Ontology Lifecycle" [4]. Of particular
interest may be the talk on the lifecycle stages (and from that one can
extrapolate requirements for versioning that would faciliatae higher
quality ontologies) - particularly Hanz Polzer and Mary Balboni's
contributions [5].

PS - Thanks for the response, will follow up offlist :D!
[1]
http://owl.cs.manchester.ac.uk/research/topics/ncit/regression-%20analysis/
[2] http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-745/paper_40.pdf
[3]
http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/work/OntologySummit2013/2013-03-07_OntologySummit2013_OntologyEvaluation-IntrinsicAspects-2/OntologySummit2013_ontology-regression-testing--MariaCopeland_20130307.pdf
[4] http://ontolog.cim3.net/OntologySummit/2013/
[5] http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ConferenceCall_2013_01_24

On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 12:49 PM, Alan Ruttenberg
<alanruttenberg@gmail.com>wrote:

> Don't forget about OWL's versionIRI, which gives a way to express that
> different versions are of a single ontology. The most basic version control
> is to periodically save a file, put it at a location, and make the
> versionIRI point to it. Keep the ontologyIRI the same thoughtout. Use
> import with the version you care load. At the ontologyIRI put either the
> most recent version or the most recent version you release.
>
> There is no need for additional repository infrastructure, though that may
> add useful features. Whatever you do, make sure that at a minimum you
> version using vanilla specifications, given that they can support that.
>
> I generally recommend you do not change IRIs of terms as you change
> versions. Rather,  try to ensure that the referents of your URIs refer to
> the same intended entities, and obsolete them if they no longer refer well.
>
> Happy to discuss this offlist if you are interested in my experiences.
>
> Best,
> Alan
>
> On Friday, April 19, 2013, Ali SH wrote:
>
>> I'm also very interested in hearing answers to this.
>>
>> As Stephen mentions, treating an ontology analogously to source code
>> (which is close enough) means that you can use services such as github (or
>> google code). The downside is that an ontology lifecycle management is *
>> not* equivalent to source code management. Barring a native solution for
>> ontologies, they do come quite close.
>>
>> You might also be interested in following the development of the Open
>> Ontology Repository [1]
>> (a fork of the BioPortal platform), which among other things will be
>> addressing this issue as well.
>>
>> [1] http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?OpenOntologyRepository
>>
>> On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 11:57 AM, Stephen D. Williams <sdw@lig.net>wrote:
>>
>>>  Do you want to version it like source code?  Everyone has, is, or will
>>> move to Git for that.
>>> Or maintain the history of changes for reasoning and/or historical
>>> queries?  This is probably more needed for actual statements, but could
>>> make sense here too: "Answer this query based on the ontology at time X."
>>>
>>> Stephen
>>>
>>>
>>> On 4/19/13 7:05 AM, Prateek wrote:
>>>
>>>  Hello all,
>>>
>>>  I am trying to identify a system which will provide versioning and
>>> revision control capabilities specifically for ontologies. Does anyone have
>>> any experience and idea about which systems can help out or if systems like
>>> SVN, CVS can do the job?
>>>
>>>  Regards
>>>
>>>  Prateek
>>>
>>>  --
>>>
>>> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
>>> Prateek Jain, Ph. D.
>>> RSM
>>> IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
>>> 1101 Kitchawan Road, 37-244
>>> Yorktown Heights, NY 10598
>>> Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/prateekj
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Stephen D. Williams sdw@lig.net stephendwilliams@gmail.com LinkedIn: http://sdw.st/in
>>> V:650-450-UNIX (8649) V:866.SDW.UNIX V:703.371.9362 F:703.995.0407AIM:sdw Skype:StephenDWilliams Yahoo:sdwlignet Resume: http://sdw.st/gres
>>> Personal: http://sdw.st facebook.com/sdwlig twitter.com/scienteer
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>>
>> (•`'·.¸(`'·.¸(•)¸.·'´)¸.·'´•) .,.,
>>
>


-- 


(•`'·.¸(`'·.¸(•)¸.·'´)¸.·'´•) .,.,