Data Versioning: From Principles to Practical Recommendations

The data lifecycle from acquisition to release is increasingly complex, involving multiple processing stages, research groups, and funding sources. There are also growing concerns about data sovereignty and data governance. This complexity demands a robust conceptual framework to ensure reproducible versioning and linking of any original datasets to their many derivatives. To address this, we initially developed six data versioning principles for digital data artifacts by analysing use cases and adapting the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) framework developed around 1995 by IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) for analogue Information Resources. Our six principles established a common language for key concepts and terms: Revision, Release, Granularity, Manifestation, Provenance, and Citation (Klump et al., 2021, https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2021-012). As part of a project supported by the Berlin University Alliance, a workshop was held to translate the principles into actionable practices. The workshop, held in June 2024 in Berlin, was attended by 40 experts from information infrastructure institutions with diverse scientific backgrounds (https://zenodo.org/records/13743876). Through this workshop and subsequent RDA community feedback, we refined our work into key recommendations. In this presentation, we will introduce these recommendations to the Australian data community, which need to be embedded in research practices in a consistent way. The recommendations cover: - adopting a consistent versioning strategy; - considering standardisation initiatives; - using persistent identifiers for unique identification of versions; - implementing clear and descriptive version labels; - ensuring user-friendly version control systems; - documenting changes and metadata; - communicating versioning practices clearly to stakeholders.