From Temporal Databases to Ontology Versioning: An Approach for Ontology Evolution

Versioning In Software Development And Cad/Cam Applications

Software systems are rarely stable following initial implementations. They have complex structures which are likely to continually undergo changes during their lifetime. Software versioning is the process of assigning unique versions to unique states of computer software. These versions correspond to new developments in the software; sometimes they are also called revisions. A software version can be identified by a sequence of numbers and/or letters (for example, “Oracle 10g”), date (for example, “Wine 20040505”), year (for example, “Windows 2000”), or alphanumeric code (for example, “Adobe Dreamweaver CS4”).

CAD/CAM, CIM, CASE tools and other engineering applications first put forward the requirement of managing multiple design versions (Kim et al., 1990). The primitive concepts of versioning were introduced to support different users concurrently working on parallel, or even merging, versions of the same piece of data (objects) (Katz, 1984) (Katz, 1990). These non-conventional applications not only often demand the support of many database states, but also design alternatives. To fulfil such requirement, works like (Kim et al., 1989) (Talens et al., 1993) have focused on the question of version support. A version describes an object in a period of time or from a certain point of view. Although some design alternatives are stored as versions, not all the history about data modification is recorded. The full history is just accessible if a temporal model is used. The majority of the above proposals have extended their data model using either temporal concepts or just version control mechanisms.