Question on Versioning with 2.1

All,

On our editor's call today, John Wunder, Rich Piazza, and myself had a question about how to handle the new spec_version property that the TC decided to add to all objects.

Question:

Does changing an object from 2.0 to 2.1 schema result in a version change? And as such can it only be done by the object creator?

The knee jerk reaction I think most people will have will be similar to our initial reaction which was "yes, it requires a version change". However, upon careful consideration, I am not sure that is a good thing. Content should be content, regardless of how it is serialized. Also, without allowing this, there is no good way to upgrade content in the wild. Products will have to support older versions of STIX for a very very long time. Further, if you do the derived relationship type, then you need something in TAXII that will say, given this relationship, go find any derived from relationships, and then walk the graph to find all of the new relationships. This will get ugly really fast and will cause analysts to not see the whole picture.

So while I think we initially thought it would be "yes", I think we might now be leaning towards "no". But this is not a decision that we editors can make. So we are bringing up to the TC to decide.

Bret

cti-stix message