Summary

Version Types

The majority of databases use calendar versioning - this is highly skewed by the abundance of calendar versioning used by ontologies from the OBO Foundry. Typically, ontologies accrue more content over time, so the concept of semantic versions makes less sense. Databases whose schema may change or major new inclusions of data types could better benefit from using semantic versioning.

Calendar Version Format

While the ISO-8601 format of YYYY-MM-DD is a standard, many databases manage to chose alternative date formats.

Has Stable URL for Each Release

It’s not enough just to assign a version string to each release of data, but also for it to be possible to download a given version of the data after it’s been released. This chart shows (for versioned data) how many have stable URLs for past versions of the data.