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Stian Soiland-Reyes edited this page Sep 1, 2016 · 16 revisions

The latest version of the OWL ontology of PAV is always available from the PAV namespace:

Namespace / OWL Documentation
http://purl.org/pav/ http://purl.org/pav/html

Current version (v2.3):

Namespace versionIRI / OWL Documentation
http://purl.org/pav/ http://purl.org/pav/2.3 http://purl.org/pav/2.3/html

Tip: You can link to every term in the documentation, e.g:

http://purl.org/pav/html#http://purl.org/pav/hasVersion

Semantic Versioning

PAV follows the Semantic versioning rules. In particular, for say v2.1.0, we consider that:

  • The major number (2.x.x) will increase if a change is breaking (such as removing or renaming a term). This will typically mean a new namespace.
  • The minor number (x.1.x) will increase if a change is non-breaking, but adds new functionality (such as a new term or OWL import)
  • The patch number (x.x.0) will increase if a change is a superficial bug-fix, such as changing typos or avoiding broken links.

Versions and changes

See the list of releases for all versions and their changelog, which includes the versionIRI links.

Example of import

Please note that the namespace is always http://purl.org/pav/ no matter which version of PAV 2.x is used.

@prefix owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#> .
@prefix pav: <http://purl.org/pav/> .
<> a owl:Ontology ;
    # Lock down import to minor version 2.3
    owl:imports <http://purl.org/pav/2.3> .

You may want to owl:imports either the namespace, http://purl.org/pav/, to always get the latest version (2.x.x), or a particular (minor or patch) versionIRI, as above, in order to lock down the version.

Note that for compatibility reasons (and limitation at GitHub hosting), http://purl.org/pav/ returns the OWL as RDF/XML, but with Content-Type: application/xml in order to present a human-readable version (by XSLT) for browsers accessing the namespace URI. Some OWL tools might not accept this media type, in such cases the versionIRI like http://purl.org/pav/2.3 should be used instead.

The versionIRI stated in the OWL files always return the latest patch version (ie. http://purl.org/pav/2.1 might serve 2.1.2) - the idea being that for most cases you would want patch updates.

Backwards compatibility

PAV 2 is based on PAV 1.2, but in a new namespace ( http://purl.org/pav/ ). Terms that are backwards-compatible with 1.2 are indicated in the PAV 2.x ontology using owl:equivalentProperty.

The ontology IRI http://purl.org/pav/ always resolve to the latest version of PAV 2. Particular versionIRIs such as http://purl.org/pav/2.3 can be used by clients to force owl:imports of a particular ontology version - note however that all terms are defined directly in the http://purl.org/pav/ namespace, e.g. the term http://purl.org/pav/version

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