Peter,
I agree 100% with your assessment. In the semantic web world, I believe
that versioning will not be very important. I think a major benefit of
using semantic web technologies is that you can build an application that
will adapt to changes in the semantics of a word as the semantics change in
the real world.
But, as you said, there may be cases where, at a significant point in time,
a community would like to version its vocabulary. The goal of this
discussion is simply to develop some guidelines for versioning, when it is
necessary, that will make the transition from a past version of a vocabulary
to an new one as easy, accurate, and flexible as possible for the users of a
vocabulary.
Mike Lang
On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 1:41 AM, Peter Ansell <ansell.peter@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ----- "John Graybeal" <graybeal@mbari.org> wrote:
>
> > On Nov 3, 2008, at 10:48 AM, Michael Lang(Jr.) wrote:
> >
> > > I strongly believe (and it seems that you and John agree) that if a
> >
> > > UID for a concept changes, the old version must have some way of
> > > pointing to the new version.
> >
> > Funny, I would have said this the other way around (new points back to
> > old, then the system services can provide the old -> new capability --
> > or is this what you are saying too?). I have this notion that *any*
> > change to a static resource's specifications -- definition, metadata,
> > semantics -- makes a new resource (this lets me compare resource_new
> > to resource_old and see the difference between them unambiguously).
> >
> > With this vision, the resource can't change once it is created, even
> > to point to a new resource (you see the problem). Is this vision just
> > plain wrong, per the consensus?
>
> Should we really focus on a "ya just never know, do ya" philosophy that
> hurts the majority of casual users more than it helps the specialised users?
> If you make up a system where you require that people manually migrate all
> their past statements in order to use the system in a months time then you
> won't be looked upon too favourably. And if you give them the choice to mass
> migrate their statements then what is the point if they always select
> "migrate all to most current versions"?
>
> This is a very radical discussion that I don't think fits the majority of
> use cases that the semantic web will be applied to, as it is decidedly anti
> Web-2.0 where there is a constant evolution and links are relative, not
> static as in Web-1.0. If you really face it, meaning migrates, and the
> particular structure at a given instant in time isn't as relevant as the
> improvement in meaning anyway. If rules in the semantic web are completely
> reliant on data structures and unable to recognise the overall meaning that
> people gradually migrate towards then they are always going to be brittle,
> whether people are perfectly pedantic about UID's and/or URI's or whether
> they end up referencing everything with relative addresses which don't focus
> on particular representations at particular points in time.
>
> It isn't bad to version information at significant points in time, but the
> archaic once-published-always-published-never-modified culture doesn't fit
> with electronic technologies IMO.
>
> (Just a few thoughts :) )
>
> Cheers,
>
> Peter
>
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