First Main Vocabulary Release

Christian_Reich · July 29, 2021, 2:10pm

Colleagues:

You may or may not have noticed the last Vocabulary Release. It’s noteworthy that this is the first one we issued as a Main Relase. It should be stable with respect many attributes, and you should be able to use it for your ETL without having to worry about refreshing too soon. We are planning on two such Main Releases per year.

In between Main Release, we will continue to make interim releases fixing issues that are coming up or making point improvements. Unless you are waiting for these modifications they will probably not matter to you that much.

Right now, the genomic variant vocabulary is blocked because we are still finalizing some issue with it. It will be open very soon.

(We call it the @Rijnbeek Birthday Release, as he is one of the main proponents of such a thing. Happy birthday, Peter. )

Ajit_Londhe · July 30, 2021, 1:22pm

Very cool! I think it’ll help organizations with designing their internal cadence of CDM ETL refreshes.

One logistics question: do Main Releases have anything to indicate they are Main, like in the Vocab version in the vocabulary table, does it say something like “v5.0 2021-07-30 MAIN”?

Christian_Reich · July 30, 2021, 6:48pm

Yes, yes, @Ajit_Londhe. We haven’t gotten there yet. Need to teach Athena to be able to indicate the release, and then also pick the release.

mik · August 11, 2021, 9:38pm

Hi @Christian_Reich, I have to pour a wee bit of water to the wine. We realized that a release earlier, we experienced a small technical hiccup in the Gemscript vocabulary that rendered it rather useless. Essentially, we gave Peter @Rijnbeek a broken toy for his birthday. He as many others will not really bother, as what is broken will probably not concern him. However, for whoever is relying on the Gemscript vocabulary it is very advisable to go for the latest release. The release notes contain additional information about the changes. And yes, we would like to teach Athena some more tricks. One set of tricks is rather under the hood and would concern how the release of vocabularies is performed, enabling some basic versioning of the vocabulary repository. And the other set would build on this and enable users to benefit from introducing multiple versions. While there can be many sophisticated approaches to this, for now we advocate for a simple one by just creating separate schemas holding the respective version. Let’s discuss this and get some more input!

A preliminary QC version could give us another last line of defense to detect weird technical issues that for example caused the Gemscript issue. We could even make it browsable as a preview ersion and only transition it to a production version at a set time. Let’s collect thoughts about that.