为什么有时会跳过 maven 依赖项中的版本号?

I am fairly new to maven's capabilities.. I have seen that in pom.xml where dependencies are put, at times, only groupID and artifact id are mentioned and version is skipped. why is this? For example the below dependency is from springsource website http://spring.io/guides/gs/authenticating-ldap/

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-security</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.security</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-security-ldap</artifactId>
        <version>3.2.4.RELEASE</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.apache.directory.server</groupId>
        <artifactId>apacheds-server-jndi</artifactId>
        <version>1.5.5</version>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

但在 stackoverflow 的其他地方也提到版本不是可选的.如果有人能解释这一点，我会很高兴.