How to version the ontology

[andrecastro0o]

How to indicate the version of the ontology, in the ontology?

The idea is that users understand what version are they dealing with, by looking a top-level ontology statements

[andrecastro0o]

@doigl mentioned in #13 (comment)

@SArndt-TIB : I would vote for just adding the year of introduction to whatever prefix, we agree on, so f.e. dfgfo2024: http://www.purl.org/dfgfo/2024 to keep the IRIs short.

what do you mean? And I am not sure, if we are still looking for a prefix or if we wanted to use the prefix from Jakob. I like the possibilities of w3id, but the question is, in what namespace of w3id we want to place the vocabulary/ontology.

[andrecastro0o]

@andrecastro0o mentioned in #13 (comment)

@doigl & @SArndt-TIB Actually, after doing a bit of reading and having come across recently the ow:versionIRI

https://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-syntax/#Ontology_IRI_and_Version_IRI mentions that

Each ontology MAY have an ontology IRI, which is used to identify an ontology. If an ontology has an ontology IRI, the ontology MAY additionally have a version IRI, which is used to identify the version of the ontology. The version IRI MAY be, but need not be, equal to the ontology IRI

Also owl:versionInfo could be useful to annotate this:

The owl:versionInfo annotation property can be used to provide an IRI with a string that describes the IRI's version.

Hence my preference is for the 2024 version to include the version in the versionIRI and versionInfo and remove the version from the title. If we agree to do so, the metadata.ttl would look like

<https://github.com/tibonto/dfgfo> rdf:type owl:Ontology ;
                                   dc:creator "Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)",
                                              "André Castro",
                                              "Susanne Arndt";
                                   dc:description "DFG Fachsystematik Ontology / DFG Classification of Subject Areas Ontology (DFGFO) encodes the DFG Classification of Subject Areas into an ontology, where each subject number are is enconded into a Class with subclass statements following the DFG Classification of Subject Areas hierarchy. Labels are provide German and English.";
                                   dc:title "DFG Classification of Subject Areas Ontology "@en ;
                                   dc:title "DFG Fachsystematik - Ontologie "@de ;
                                   rdfs:comment "DFG Classification of Subject Areas Ontology is being created as part of the TIB Terminology Service"@de ;
                                   rdfs:comment "DFG Fachsystematik - Ontology wurde zur Integration in den TIB Terminology Service erstellt"@de ;
                                   terms:license <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/> . 
                                   owl:versionInfo "2024-2028" .
                                   owl:versionIRI  <https://github.com/tibonto/DFG-Fachsystematik-Ontology/releases/2023-01-17/dfgfo.ttl>

I am more unsure about the future IRI, I believe @SArndt-TIB has a good idea about it, and is being handled in #10

PS: I will try to move this discussion to a separate issue

[andrecastro0o]

A few more links on the topic:

• Recommended IRI patterns for ontologies and their terms see section "IRIs for the Unversioned Resource"
• 3.3 Versioning of OWL 2 Ontologies