Version Design Considerations

  • Semantic Versioning: A semantic version string is made up from 3 integers in the format major.minor.incremental.

An increment in only the …

  • … incremental component signifies a non-breaking bug fix.
  • … minor component signifies a non-breaking feature addition.
  • … major component signifies a breaking change.

Translating these to datasets would roughly mean:

  • An incremental update would be fixing labels
  • A minor update would be the addition of new instances and properties

  • A major update would be schema changes or the removal of instances or properties (as those instances may have been referenced in the downstream process)

  • It may be tempting to use the format yyyy.MM.dd such as <version>2024.02.15</version>, however this may make it difficult to publish updated versions of data at that time later on. For example, if it turns out there was a bug in the data generator and several versions are broken.

Possible mitigations:

  • Make the data generator revision part of the groupId such as <groupId>org.myorg.myproject.datagen.v2</groupId>
  • Reserve the major version field for revisions <version>1.20240215.0</version>