At 15:24 -0600 13/12/2000, Eileen Quam wrote:
>There appears to be no way to express dates such as "August 2000" or
>"Spring-Summer 1999", which regularly appear on the items in
>question (I am building a citaiton database).
IIRC, the ISO-8601 standard allows you to leave off the bits you
don't need. So August 2000 could be expressed as "2000-08". At
display-time, you can convert from ISO-8601 format to "human
readable" format - in whatever language "human readable" happens to
be for you.
"Spring-Summer 1999" could be written using the "specific period" notation:
"1999-09/2000-02"
Which incidentally translates to "Autumn-Winter 1999" in
human-readable format for Americans, but they're on the wrong side of
the globe in the first place, so they don't really matter ;)
> Do you know if the DC community has bumped into this issue and
>come up with a preferred workaround (i.e. include the "human
>readable" format as a note...). I could translate to ISO8601 for
>the sake of storage/ordering, but want the natural language dates
>for display.
For your sanity's sake, use ISO-8601 for storage, and convert to
"human readable" for display purposes. This means your data can be
used by non-English speakers.
A possible list of translations includes:
<year1>-01/<year1>-03 => "First Quarter <year1>"
<year1>-04/<year1>-06 => "Second Quarter <year1>"
...
<year1>-12/<year2>-02 => "Summer <year2>"
<year1>-03/<year1>-05 => "Autumn <year1>"
<year1>-06/<year1>-08 => "Winter <year1>"
<year1>-09/<year1>-11 => "Spring <year1>"
Since seasons and calendar divisions overlap, it's easy to
distinguish which three-month period you're talking about. You may
want to include geographic information in DC.Coverage to indicate
which hemisphere is the context for your seasons though, otherwise
people might start assuming that "Spring" means "March through May".
Foolish people :)
Regards
Alex Satrapa
--
Alex Satrapa tSA Consulting Group Pty Limited
ICQ: 5691434 1 Hall Street, Lyneham, Canberra 2603
PGP Key 0x4C178C9C fx: +61 2 6257 7311 ph: +61 2 6257 7111
PGP Fingerprint E4FA ADE6 97A4 3610 E008 A466 A03E 3D01 4C17 8C9C
|