reference previous version (owl:priorVersion)

[carueda]

In old system: mmisw/mmiorr#381

... we should add this attribute and automatically populate it.

[carueda]

• the automatic assignment of owl:priorVersion presumably to be only done on:

  • ontologies created with the ORR vocabulary and mapping tools
  • ontologies uploaded in fully-hosted mode (if there's a owl:priorVersion already present upon very first upload, it's retained; otherwise it's assigned to point to the original IRI)

• upon subsequent version registrations, the ORR automatically assigns the property to point to the previous version

• upon the unregistration of a version, the system should update the value of the owl:priorVersion of the next registered version

@graybeal comments?

[lewismc]

I kinda have an issue with this one... why? Because I feel it it down to the author to explicitly define the owl:priorVersion... what happens if they are not using semantic versioning? What happens if they skip a version? What happens if they never had a previous version to begin with?

[graybeal]

You may be right to want to drop this, but I don't find your arguments compelling, because it isn't the user creating the new ontology, it's COR.

The user does a bunch of things with COR's UI and poof! an ontology comes out the other side. The user typically has no idea what an ontology is, what semantic versioning is, what it means to skip a version, or when "versioning" even started. But the COR system knows all those things.

COR provides a nice interface that let's the user do things. If it references the previous version, it could let the user and others do more things later, like track changes over time and see the history of the entity back to its creation. All of it automatically, without the user having to manually remember and appropriately make the appropriate changes (which will hardly ever happen, let alone happen consistently.

So it's trying to make the ontology into a maore FAIR artifact, with actual provenance.

But we've come a long way from COR's original vision, almost entirely changes for the good. I'll have to build my fortune for a long time before I can make it into the strange beast I had originally envisioned. ;-)