April 2024 release - AI and more

Additional terms relating to Artificial Intelligence have been added.

Roughly one hundred additional suggestions for new concepts or changes to existing ones made up to this point have been considered and incorporated where appropriate, across almost all disciplines.

Nothing additional has been deprecated in this release.

June 2023 release - Physics of Living Systems

Reorganization of Biological Physics

All changes in this release are related to a reorganization of the Biological Physics discipline, now renamed to "Physics of Living Systems" to better indicate the scope of the topics included. The top-level "Research Areas" in the discipline have been recombined or renamed, and close to 50 new concepts have been added. About a dozen concepts have had label changes to clarify their scope or to avoid ambiguity. A handful of concepts from the old scheme have been deprecated as duplicative or overly narrow; as usual these are documented with recommended replacements in the deprecated.csv file in this release.

November 2022 Release

Some reorganization and renaming at the discipline level

All concept suggestions as of mid-2022 have been reviewed, and those accepted have been added to this release.

This release for the first time deprecates a discipline: "General Physics". Most of the concepts in active use there relate to quantum physics, and have been moved to the "Quantum Information Science & Technology" (previously "Quantum Information") discipline. Most of the remaining general concepts were moved to "Interdisciplinary Physics" or other relevant areas of PhySH. "Classical field theory" and "Electromagnetism" were decided to be duplicative and have been deprecated in favor of "Classical electromagnetism" (in the facet "Theoretical & Computational Techniques").

Note that "Statistical Physics" has been renamed "Statistical Physics & Thermodynamics" to more fully capture the scope.

The discipline "Quantum Information Science & Technology" has an adjusted top-level hierarchy resulting from the merger with concepts from "General Physics"/"Quantum Theory".

May 2022 Release: Clearing the backlog

New concepts across several disciplines

A significant backlog of requests for missing physics concepts across all our disciplines had accumulated and needed to be reviewed. This release includes significant new concepts in Atomic, Molecular & Optical Physics, Fluid Dynamics, Nuclear Physics, and Particles & Fields. A small number of new concepts were added in some of the other disciplines as well.

A relatively small number of concepts had label changes to clarify meaning or to fix spelling, capitalization or other typographical problems. Additional relationships between concepts have been added where they seemed useful.

Deprecated concept

This release creates one deprecated concept in the taxonomy - "Charge distributions" within the discipline "Nuclear Physics" was a duplicate of the concept "Nuclear charge distribution", and has been retired. The deprecated.csv file now only has this one entry.

Identifier normalization; quantum information and energy science

Identifier mapping

The major change (necessitating the bump in major version number) is a fix for the underlying identifiers. The majority of the id's used by PhySH were in the standard 36-character UUID format: 32 hexadecimal characters and 4 hyphens (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier). However, due to some buggy software used to create some of the identifiers, a large fraction of them were missing the hyphen characters. This new release standardizes all PhySH identifiers to use the full UUID format with hyphen characters. A new file, uuid_mapping.csv, is included which shows the pairing of old and new identifier values where they have been changed.

We are also taking advantage of this backwards incompatibility to completely delete identifiers that had been deprecated in previous releases. This initial release (2.2) has no deprecated concepts; all previously deprecated ones are gone. The file 'deprecated.csv' lists those old identifiers that have now been removed, and suggested replacement id's if any.

A combined mapping file, 'full_mapping_2.0.csv' is also included, which combines both the uuid mapping and the deprecated concept mapping.

New Discipline and Concepts

This release also includes a new discipline: "Energy Science & Technology", to better support concepts relating to energy sources, storage, utilization, and issues of sustainability. Additional changes have also been made in Quantum Information and within the Condensed Matter disciplines, with a number of new concepts added in both areas.

Full Changelog: v1.1.1...v2.2.0

Minor fix and addition of SKOS-compatibility file

This release includes a new ttl file, physh_skos_compat.ttl, which translates the custom RDF predicates used by PhySH into normal SKOS concept relations. It also includes minor corrections to some labels that were done in the interim.

Fluid Dynamics updates (July 2018)

Draft release containing significant updates to the Fluid Dynamics section of PhySH from our editors.

First public release of PhySH

This if the first public release of the PhySH physics classification system, dated June 13, 2018