Versions

The latest version of the OWL ontology of PAV is always available from the PAV namespace:

Namespace / OWL	Documentation
http://purl.org/pav/	http://purl.org/pav/html

Current version (v2.3):

Namespace	versionIRI / OWL	Documentation
http://purl.org/pav/	http://purl.org/pav/2.3	http://purl.org/pav/2.3/html

**Tip**: You can mint a URI for each term in the documentation: http://purl.org/pav/2.3/html#http://purl.org/pav/hasVersion

Semantic Versioning

PAV follows the Semantic versioning rules. In particular, for say v2.1.0, we consider that:

• The major number (2.x.x) will increase if a change is breaking (such as removing or renaming a term). This will typically mean a new namespace.
• The minor number (x.1.x) will increase if a change is non-breaking, but adds new functionality (such as a new term or OWL import)
• The patch number (x.x.0) will increase if a change is a superficial bug-fix, such as changing typos or avoiding broken links.

Versions and changes

See the list of releases for all versions and their changelog, which includes the versionIRI links.

Example of import

Please note that the namespace is always http://purl.org/pav/ no matter which version of PAV 2.x is used.

@prefix owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#> .
@prefix pav: <http://purl.org/pav/> .
<> a owl:Ontology ;
    # Lock down import to minor version 2.3
    owl:imports <http://purl.org/pav/2.3> .

You may want to owl:imports either the namespace, http://purl.org/pav/, to always get the latest version (2.x.x), or a particular (minor or patch) versionIRI, as above, in order to lock down the version.

_Note that for compatibility reasons, http://purl.org/pav/ returns the OWL as RDF/XML, but with Content-Type: application/xml in order to present a human-readable version (by XSLT) for browsers accessing the namespace URI. Some OWL tools might not accept this media type, in such cases the versionIRI like http://purl.org/pav/2.1 should be used instead.

The versionIRI stated in the OWL files always return the latest patch version (ie. http://purl.org/pav/2.1 might serve 2.1.2) - the idea being that for most cases you would want patch updates.