- From: Lee Jonas <lee.jonas@cakehouse.co.uk>
- Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2000 11:16:26 +0100
- To: "'www-rdf-comments@w3.org'" <www-rdf-comments@w3.org>
In the RDF Schema specification, section 1.2.1 (Versioning and URI references) identifies problems of change management for schema docs. However, it skirts the issue by suggesting that the problem is not in the scope of the spec. I envisage that if RDF becomes widely accepted, the versioning problem will rear its ugly head sooner rather than later. I would like to see the problem addressed so that there is a comprehensive, standard way of the RDF community dealing with such issues. It will seriously detract from the use of RDF if a plethora of versioning schemes find their way into RDF schemas making consistent, predictable schema processing nearly imposible. Standard RDF schema versioning facilities would set out exactly how to treat versioning, and would allow RDF processors to behave more intelligently towards these issues, even if this is as simple as issuing an intelligible warning. IMHO putting changes into totally new schemas gets around problems with versioning, but implies that once a schema is published it must be available (and hence supported) forever more. I suggest the introduction of a 'deprecated' property that allows schema publishers to indicate that RDF classes or indeed whole schemas will be deleted at some point in the future. This would provide a procedure for them to withdraw elements / schemas after a sufficient time lag: <rdf:Property ID="deprecated" rdfs:label="deprecated" rdfs:comment="A date indicating when a resource was deprecated" rdfs:range="#Literal"/> <rdf:Property ID="terminates" rdfs:label="terminates" rdfs:comment="A date indicating when a resource will be terminated" rdfs:range="#Literal"/> Also, it might be a good idea to incorporate other change management properties, such as 'obsoletedBy', 'supercedes', etc. (These examples inspired by the RFC change management conventions). regards Lee Jonas
Received on Tuesday, 1 August 2000 06:18:40 UTC