standard names for ontologies IRI(s) with version and dates

Question

I've read here https://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-syntax/#IRIs that an Ontology's IRI should (not must) have a date and a version

I tried to follow the examples there and I found that they are doing the following for IRI

"<http://" +"mywebsitename" + ".com or .org or .whatever" + "//" + "year" + "/" + "month" + "day"+ "/" + "the name of the ontology" + "#>"

my question is that correct? so where do I put the version?

Joshua Taylor Joshua Taylor · Accepted Answer · 2016-02-26T16:53:44

I may be missing part of the document that you're citing, but I don't see any recommendation that "Ontology's IRI should (not must) have a date and a version". That said, it's a useful convention, but note that with OWL 2, there can be two IRIs associated with a particular ontology. One is the ontology IRI, which as you say, doesn't typically have version/date/etc., information available in it. The second is the (optional) ontology version IRI. The specification for the functional-style syntax is:

Ontology :=
    'Ontology' '(' [ ontologyIRI [ versionIRI ] ]
       directlyImportsDocuments
       ontologyAnnotations
       axioms
    ')'

I think it'd be more common to do something like

Ontology( <http://example.org/llamas>
          <http://example.org/llamas/2016/02/26>
          ... )

where http://example.org/llamas is the ontology IRI, and http://example.org/llamas/2016/02/26 is the ontology version IRI. But what you use for a version IRI (and for the ontology IRI, too, for that matter) is really up to you. If you look around, you can find some conventions, but IRIs are opaque, there's not a mandatory way to encode that information.

standard names for ontologies IRI(s) with version and dates

1 Answers