Welcome to a new era in the Arches Project world! With the release of Arches Version 8 on June 15th 2025, the platform has taken a major leap forward—introducing powerful new features, refined architecture, and a more formal framework for developing and managing applications.
At Farallon, we’re excited to unpack what’s new in V8. From architectural improvements to business-friendly modeling tools, we’ll walk you through what’s changed, why it matters, and how these changes will benefit different types of users. In this post, will see how Graph Versioning impacts project managers that are implementing Arches for their or their clients’ business needs. If you are an application developer and want to understand how new features are simplifying development, check out our post specifically for you!
You can explore the full list of features here!
The Big One: Graph Versioning Refines Data Modeling
If you’ve ever set up Arches for a project or worked with relational databases in the past, you already know the importance of getting your data models right. Data models set the foundation for everything that Arches does and shape the data that you store in the system to meet your business vertical.
In previous versions, changing a data model required a heavy-handed approach: delete all data, update the model, and re-import everything. Even though the Bulk Data Manager preserved your data during this process, it was far from efficient—especially during early project stages when teams are still shaping their models.
We’ve heard from the community—and experienced ourselves many times over at Farallon— about the frustrations in the early stages of a project or implementation. Rob Gaston, Senior Web Developer at Farallon, recalls the feedback he has seen from the Arches community around project liftoff:
“for those folks trying to get a project up and running, we’ve often heard people express that changing models can be a pain point. ‘I want to just be able to iterate on my models in peace and then update the data and rerun an ETL.’ Is a common theme. There’s probably nobody in the Arches Community who has set up an Arches application from scratch who won’t recognize that this is a gap.”
This changes in V8 with the introduction of Graph Versioning.
What is Graph Versioning?
Graph Versioning opens the doors for greater flexibility in model development. Now, published graph models can be edited without having to delete resource data. In fact, V8 allows administrators to make many model improvements without requiring the model to be unpublished (we’ll explore the specific attributes of this in a later post). However, it’s common that model shapes will need to be updated during system development.
With V8, when a graph designer or a system administrator wants to adjust the structure of a resource model, they may navigate to the “Manage” button in the top left corner of the graph designer UI and click “Draft an Update” within the dropdown. This will enter the user into a new, unsaved instance of the model where changes can be applied, thereby creating a new version of a model.
Graph Versioning allows edits to model shapes even when tile data exists within a model’s node groups. This is a big shift from previous versions. As the structure of the model changes, so too does the form of the data within it. Version 8 introduces a new safeguard here: when changes are ready to be published, the system prompts users to decide whether they’d like to automatically migrate existing data to match the updated structure.
This option offers a powerful new degree of control—but it also requires some thought. Not every change should be migrated automatically, especially in more complex or data-heavy environments. Whether automatic migration is appropriate depends on the stage of your project and the complexity of your model, with consideration of the benefits and risks.
Ad-Hoc Changes: Quick and Flexible Projects
For teams in the early stages of implementing an Arches project, data models are often still evolving. In these cases, the focus is usually on identifying gaps in the data structure, making incremental improvements, and building out node groups as needs become clearer. Completeness of the dataset isn’t critical yet, and any changes made are typically additive—such as introducing new attributes or minor node group adjustments.
Arches will keep track of the various iterations that model goes through via a model’s Version History. Users can attach notes that describe the changes between versions and can easily switch between existing versions with the click of a button. Furthermore, Arches will automatically adapt your data to meet the version that you choose!
In this kind of ad-hoc editing, automatic migration is not only safe but extremely useful. By allowing data to conform automatically to updated models, project teams can move quickly, test the impact of changes, and continue refining their models without redoing setup work or reloading data. This ability to iterate is a huge improvement for small projects and for larger teams still working through the early cycles of data loading and transformation.
Rob recounts the guiding principle that informed the team throughout development: “for people who are either working on a small project that just wants to make some incremental model changes or for larger projects that are in those early ETL iterative stages, it’s definitely about delivering flexibility.”
Looking Ahead: Flexibility Means More Aligned Implementations
Flexibility in data modeling has always been a core value of Arches. Because the platform is used around the world across many disciplines—architecture, archaeology, archives, and more—its models must adapt to diverse workflows, standards, and cultural needs. What’s meaningful to one region or organization might not be relevant elsewhere.
Version 8 reinforces that commitment to adaptability. Graph Versioning helps teams deliver working software faster, gather feedback more quickly, and align their implementations more closely with real-world requirements. Enabling an iterative development environment makes Arches more scalable to evolving business needs over the course of an entire project, not just the initial stages.
Arches is more adaptable than it’s ever been to user needs, and this allows users to take advantage of new integration opportunities to bolster data management. This is especially pertinent for the Arches Project community as new Arches applications like Arches Querysets, Arches Lingo, and Arches for Reference and Sample Collections are on the horizon.
Ultimately, flexible data modeling ensures that the information you capture today remains relevant and useful tomorrow—even as knowledge grows, classifications evolve, and research questions change.
What’s Next
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be diving deeper into other features introduced in Version 8, including holistic data management tools and some best practices around planning data migrations. We’ll also be sharing updates on upcoming Arches Applications and what they mean for different sectors.
In the meantime, we encourage you to start exploring Graph Versioning and thinking about how it could change the way you build, manage, and scale your Arches projects.
Have questions or want to share your experience with V8? We’d love to hear from you.
