Edit ontology file

[7patricia]

It would be nice to be able to change the file uploaded in a saved ontology

[chalkos]

What about existing queries that may not work with the new file?

[7patricia]

@chalkos I think that should be for the user to worry about. For example when you have the same structure of ontology but add more data to it it would be really helpful to be able to just update a file with the new data and still keep all the metadata and queries from before

[chalkos]

We previously thought about this and agreed that updating ontologies should be non-destructive. An approach would be to add the notion of versions. Possible features include:

• an updated ontology could be uploaded, becoming a new version of an existing ontology
• old queries could be copied over newer versions
  • a improvement over the above would be to have a management system for queries, allowing the specification of which queries work with which versions (this would allow creating a query for any version and copy it to any other version)

The main reasoning is that other users may also be using the ontology and using queries that could stop working or produce different results, without any kind of warning or error message. We concluded that an update to the ontology should not implicitly break existing functionality. There is also a way to produce an error message and avoid silently breaking existing functionality:

Implement a "copy query/queries" action. Example use-case:

1. Owner uploads ontology A
2. Owner creates queries for A
3. Owner uploads new version of A, call it B
4. Owner copies queries from A to B (this it not implemented)
5. Owner can decide to keep/delete A, B or both

This way even if the user decides to delete ontology A (the older version) it is clear that anything that uses that ontology will stop working (queries, webservices, bookmarks, ...). And it will produce an error if someone tries to query it again.