Versioning and Status

An artifact can evolve after it is first created. Fields can be added, constraints tightened, wording corrected. The CEDAR model tracks this change so that an artifact can advance to a new version while the metadata already built against an earlier one stays anchored to it.

Only schema artifacts — templates, elements, and fields — carry this record. An instance is not versioned. It points instead to the template it was built from, with isBasedOn.

type: template
name: Study
status: published
version: 2.0.0
previousVersion: https://repo.metadatacenter.org/templates/7b8977e

Status

status marks where an artifact sits in its lifecycle. A draft is a working copy, open to editing. A published artifact is a released version. Publishing freezes the artifact so it will not change, which lets any instance built against it stay valid. A published artifact is never edited in place. To revise it, a new draft is created, and that draft carries the published version forward as its predecessor.

Key	Value	Presence	Meaning
status	draft or published	optional	The artifact's lifecycle state.

Version and History

version gives the artifact a released identity, written as a major.minor.patch number in the style of semantic versioning. The rightmost number marks a trivial change, the middle a minor one, and the leftmost a major one. In CEDAR a new artifact starts at 0.0.1, and each release takes a number higher than the last.

previousVersion links a version back to the one it succeeded, so a chain of releases can be followed from newest to oldest. Each version is a distinct artifact with its own id, and previousVersion is what threads them together.

Key	Value	Presence	Meaning
version	string	optional	The artifact version, as major.minor.patch (for example 1.0.0).
previousVersion	IRI	optional	The previous version of this artifact, if any.

The version of the CEDAR model an artifact is written against is recorded separately, in modelVersion; see Core Artifact Structure.