I have a rails application for a research group and the data just grows. One requested feature in the application is to provide a way to track the changes made in the data. I have used PaperTrail for this and is quite efficient for just tracking the changes.
The problem I am in is that there needs to be a way to download the data at a particular instance and share this URL so that other researchers can view at the exact same data. I am completely lost at how to achieve this functionality. Additionally, the models have some associations between them. For eg: Models: Coral, Observation, Measurement, Location They have a number of associations like many-to-many, one-to-many etc.
Questions 1. How can I version the database so that there can be a URL which points to the exact data during that version ? 2. Should I create an API for that ?
Please help me 
Regards Suren