Vocabulary stability policy

How Compare the Cloud keeps the identifiers in this vocabulary stable.

Identifiers

Every scheme and term IRI under https://www.comparethecloud.net/vocab/ is permanent. Renaming a term changes its label, not its IRI.
A term moved to another scheme keeps its original IRI and changes its skos:inScheme. The path records the scheme the term was first published in.
Term and scheme keys are never reused. A retired key stays reserved, even after no content uses it.

A retired term keeps resolving. Its description stays published, marked owl:deprecated true, with its last public label and definition.
Where a public term replaces it, the description links to that term with dct:isReplacedBy. A retired term is never redirected to a merely similar term.
Terms that were never published return 404.
The one exception is content that Compare the Cloud is legally required to remove. Its key would still stay reserved.

A clarification that keeps a definition's meaning is published in a new release. A materially different meaning gets a new term, not a changed one.

Each release has its own identifier, such as ctc-0123456789abcdef01234567, and is served unchanged at /vocab/releases/{id}/, including /vocab/releases/{id}/vocabulary.ttl.
The unversioned addresses, such as /vocab/vocabulary.ttl and each term IRI, describe the current release. Release versions belong to these documents, not to term identities, so every release describes the same term IRIs.
The dataset description at /vocab/dataset states the current release as dcat:version. Each scheme states its release-specific address as owl:versionIRI.
The JSON-LD context at /vocab/context/v1.jsonld never changes. An incompatible context would be published as a new version alongside it.