How to best document changes in current version?

[Tim Williams]

Hello everyone,

I am looking for advice on how to best document the list of changes in a new version compared to a previous release. I am working with RDF Data Cubes and want to document both minor and major version changes when I create a new cube.   

I am already using the following in my dataset:

ds:dataset 

        rdfs:comment       

        rdfs:label         

        dct:description    

        dct:title          

        qb:structure       

        pav:createdBy      

        pav:createdOn      

        pav:createdWith    

        pav:providedBy     

        pav:version

        pav:previousVersion

        dcat:distribution  

        prov:wasDerivedFrom

Thank you for any guidance you may be able to provide. 

Tim

[Stian Soiland-Reyes]

Apologies for missing your message (!)

I think it is slightly out of scope for PAV to detail the break-down of changes. I would suggest using prov:qualifiedDerivation to detail the prov:wasRevisionOf inferred from its subproperty pav:previousVersion.

e.g.

<doc-v2.pdf> pav:previousVersion <doc-v1.pdf> ;
  prov:qualifiedDerivation [
    a prov:Revision ;
    rdfs:comment "Deleted everything that was secret; nicer colours now" ] .

If you want to list a chain of changes, then one could argue they are not multiple revisions (if the intermediate changes were not released). In that case you have to become quite granular and use prov:Activites.

<doc-v2.pdf> prov:wasGeneratedBy :revising, :deleting, :colouring .

:revising a prov:Activity ;
    rdfs:label "Revising sentence structures" ;
    prov:used <doc-v1.pdf> .

:deleting a prov:Activity ;
    rdfs:label "Deleting stuff we can't tell the world about yet" ;
    prov:used <doc-v1.pdf> .

:colouring a prov:Activity ;
    rdfs:label "Adding lovely colours" ;
    prov:used <doc-v1.pdf> .

If you want (say this is within Google docs) you can add multiple agents to those activities

:colouring prov:wasAssociatedWith :Bob .

:revising prov:wasAssociatedWith :Alice, :Bob .

:deleting prov:wasAssociatedWith [ a prov:Agent ] .

If you want to detail the partial order of the activities, then you have several options, like prov:startedAtTime/prov:endedAtTime, and breaking down to a series of intermediate entities for the document in the different stages.