Jeni's Musings

I think that it’s better to keep the same version identifier. To make this work well with versioned documents, some additional vocabulary would be useful: “This document is no longer valid and superseded by that one over there.” “This document is valid from date X through date Y.” The main question is what would be a good venue to standardize such a vocabulary. I don’t know the answer.

If you treat every document containing RDF data as an OWL ontology (which just happens to only contain instance data) then you can use some of OWL’s vocab for exactly that. And it will make the DL reasoners happy I guess. ;-) For example owl:priorVersion and its sub-properties might be useful. And in OWL 2 you can even keep the ontology URI the same and just change its version IRI (a new property) so it’s all connected through the ontology URI. It doesn’t have anything for deprecating ontologies though. To express the temporal validity of a document you can use dcterms:valid although it doesn’t specify a format for how to express such a range. I guess you’d do that with OWL Time.