On Wed, 21 Jan 2015 14:03:44 -0600 Steve Baskauf steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu wrote:
I'm not sure that I get the distinction between "deprecated" and "obsolete". Can't all terms just be either currently recommended or deprecated? Terms should never go away in the RDF, they should be marked as deprecated.
The usual sense I take from these is that deprecated means some feature will still work, but that it is planned that support for it will be removed for it in a future release, things will work if you use it now, but you should be removing it from any production systems as it will stop working in the future. On the other hand obsolete means that support for it has allready been removed, and use of the feature is expected to cause failures in up to date production systems. Typical sense is in an API, where some function can be annotated as deprecated in one release and then removed from the API in some subsequent release.
In open world systems, the terms do indeed not go away, however, an application that consumes or generates documents using an RDF vocabulary can break as terms are obsoleted and removed from that vocabulary, and annotating terms as deprecated signals developers of generating and consuming applications of places where they will need to make preparations for future changes.
I would expect a deprecated term to exist in a current version of a vocabulary (with an annotation marking it as such), I would only expect an obsolete term to exist in historical versions of the vocabulary and in a history document, not in the current vocabulary.
For RDF in the wild, it's open world, and a prudent developer would expect obsolte terms to exist in RDF documents.
-Paul