[Data-modeling] software versions/releases in the computer domain?

[Aseem Mohanty]

I have been thinking about this (done nothing as yet) along the lines of 
software families/generations and major/minor/bugfix releases. This had 
come up in the discussion pages some time back, however as I mentioned I 
have not been able to do much. I am planning on starting a review of the 
entire domain sometime soon, because it has accumulated things over time 
that could possibly be organized better.

In the short run, I think this might lead to an inconsistency in the 
domain as some products may be typed the right way and some might not be 
, which although not invalid, will not convey the right information in 
the general case. Having said that I am more than willing to to create 
the appropriate type schema and set it up in the domain, or if you 
already have the type schema, promote it, so that specific topics can at 
least use the type.

Does that work?

AM

brendan wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> I was looking at specifying browser support for the "Freebase 
> Application" type and the problem wended it's way over to the computer 
> domain.
> 
> It looks a little complicated, but perhaps tractable. Here's a proposal:
> 
> currently, there exists a type "Software" and a type "Web Browser" that 
> includes the "Software" type.  So far so good: a web browser is a topic 
> about the (mostly) well defined web browsers software projects: Internet 
> Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari.  Now, I know there are probably some 
> odd ball software projects that changed hands, changed names and no one 
> can agree what it should be called now but I'm being practical here.
> 
> "Software" has a property "Latest Version" which is a text field but no 
> "Versions" or "Releases" property.
> 
> I propose that "Software" get a new property "Major Releases" with an 
> expected type "Major Software Release".  Every major release of the 
> software can have an associated topic. This is an abstract thing. e.g. 
> "Internet Explorer 5" would refer to a generation of of software 
> releases *not* an actual initial release version (i.e. with a version # 
> or for a particular platform)  In the case of IE, this is precisely how 
> the wikipedia community has chosen to slice up the problem (though for 
> Firefox they lump it all into one topic) Yes, it can be arbitrary, but 
> this is generally how software is marketed and how people view it, in my 
> estimation.
> 
> We could stop here.  The utility I seek would be met by this change.
> 
> However...
> 
> The "Major Software Release" type could have a property "Releases" with 
> an expected type "Software Release", so every actual versioned release 
> could have a topic
> 
> e.g.
>                                                                             
> ---> 1.0
>                                    * ---> Mozilla Firefox 1 ---> 1.0.1
>                                    
> *                                       ---> ...
>                                    
> *                                       ---> 1.5
> Mozilla Firefox ---> *
>                                   * ---> Mozilla Firefox 2 ...
>                                   * ---> Mozilla Firefox 3 ...
> 
> In fact, a lot of people might consider Firefox 1.5 a major release 
> (because of the new gecko engine version)  I wouldn't have a problem 
> with that organization (though it's somewhat counter-intuitive)
> 
> The minor versioning presents the problem of platform. "Software 
> Release" could have a property "Platform" with an expected type 
> "Operating System" (which is an existing type that, uh, has it's own 
> basic scheme for dealing with versions but I'll abstain from describing 
> that)  Now, I know, there may be examples where software releases are 
> made for only certain flavors of operating system (e.g. Mac OS 10.4.9 
> Intel) but I'd rather stop here and see what everyone thinks.  Thoughts? 
> Confounding use cases?
> 
> thanks,
> 
> Brendan
> 
> 
> 
>