RDF, Namespaces, and Versioning?

[Clark Evans]

David Megginson wrote:
> 
> As far as Namespaces is concerned, the namespace URI is a black box --
> it doesn't point to anything, and it doesn't mean anything.  The
> creator, however, is free to add internal structure:
> 
>   http://www.megginson.com/ns/business/1999-01-29/
>   http://www.megginson.com/ns/business/1999-02-09/
> 

First, thank you for your reply.  It was helpful. However, 
I do know, the spec dosn't say _how_ to use namespaces.

When you design something, it helps to have several
"use cases" that describe _how_ the software/standard/etc.
will/could be used to solve a real world problem.  This
is what I'm after.  How does one do versioning?

Let's say that one of your clients, BigTools, was
using your architecture 
  http://www.megginson.com/ns/business/1999-01-29/
to describe their products.

Now lets say that I'm the author of a simple tool
vendor search engine. Suppose this engine only needs 
information defined by a small subset of your 
architecture.  To make things interesting, let's say
I do this for 500 vendors....

Now.  One year later, you make a few "backward"
compatible changes to the architecture, and
convert all of your clients, including BigTools,
to this new version.

Shouldn't there be a way to mark the namespace
so that it is knowable (from the declaration?)
that 
   http://www.megginson.com/ns/business/1999-01-29/
is a proper subset of the newer:
   http://www.megginson.com/ns/business/1999-02-09/
_or_ a way to know that they are not backward compatible?


Hmm.

I suppose that your new architecture could define,
in its definition, the mapping to the old architecture.

Clark

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