Auto-update 'date modified' in ontology when generating html|md

[F3RR3T]

Situation

Within an 'Ontology' object, there is a 'date modified' literal:

<http://linked.data.gov.au/def/phs> rdf:type owl:Ontology ;
   owl:versionIRI <https://...> ;
    ...
    dcterms:modified "2020-05-15"^^xsd:date ;
    ...

It is good practice for (human) editors to update this value when they have made some changes, but it is a task that is easily forgotten.

Proposed feature

Is it feasible (and desirable) to have pyLODE perform this task when it does the translation to HTML or markdown?

Considerations

• It could be settable using a switch, perhaps with the default being 'no autoupdate' to maintain current functionality.

• The date could be derived from the 'modified' timestamp of the text file, or the current clock time. If the ontology is maintained in several files, perhaps the timestamp of the repo could be used, although this may bring in dependencies on git (or whatever version control system is used, if any).

• For international collaborations that span time zone, there may be confusion about the day, but since the resolution of the term is just to the nearest day, this will only affect recent updates. The 'modified' timestamp should not be relied on as a version indicator, since the "Ontology' object already contains a 'versionIRI'.

[F3RR3T]

Add 'Enhancement' tag

[nicholascar]

Is it feasible (and desirable)...

It is entirely feasible but sorry but I don't think it's desirable. The documented version (HTML or MD) really does have to perfectly accord with the RDF version and this breaks that by setting the documented version to something other than the RDF version.

It may work if a flag was set that both created a current modified date for the documented version and the source version, but allowing pyLODE to modify the RDF data is a bit scary.

I'll leave this Issue open for a while and if anyone else wants to support or nay say it, they can do so here and that might help forming a policy.

[graybeal]

You could provide contextual metadata outside the content area that could show this kind of ‘about’ info, like your source IRI and branding into.