Nice one Nick, that's a brilliant idea. Obviously it's pretty much impossible to get complete consensus on start/end date (or even existence) of all periods, especially those that vary from place to place, but something like this is still really useful. I wonder if it could be held in a collaborative environment of some sort.
Let us know when your experiment is ready for public consumption.
Cheers, Jeremy
Jeremy Ottevanger
Web Developer, Museum Systems Team
Museum of London
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-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Nicholas Crofts
Sent: 04 October 2009 01:10
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MCG] BC dates [Scanned]
The CIDOC conference in Santiago has just finished. One of things we were talking about was a thesaurus of period names that gives start/end time intervals. A lot periods require BCE dates. Geological periods obviously won't fit into the four-digit year ISO standard, so this isn't ISO compatible.
I've been working on an experimental RESTful webservice version that provides data about period names in SKOS format (example below for the term "Jurassic"). This is intended to be machine-readable, so it may look a bit complicated if you're not familiar with SKOS. The service accepts either 'label' or 'id' as a parameter. The label can contain wildcards '%'. The top term is "Eternity".
The SKOS "prefLabel" tag contains the period name, the "definition" tag contains the numerical time interval while the "scopeNote" contains a more human friendly version of the interval. Most of the period names, scopeNotes, etc. are in both French and English.
I'd be delighted to have any feedback on this.
Nick Crofts
av. miremont 23c
ch-1206 genève
+41 22 557 90 92
[log in to unmask]
www.crofts.ch
P.S. John asked "I am curious to know how many BC objects have a known day and month?"
Admittedly it's not BCE, but I do have a small lump of volcanic rock from Pompei that can be dated to within an hour or so...
Example request for http://www.open-world.ch/restapi/V2/thesaurus/chrono.php?label=jurassic
<rdf:RDF>
http://www.open-world.ch/restapi/V2/thesaurus/chrono.php?id=3184313"/>
</skos:ConceptScheme>
<skos:prefLabel xml:lang="en">Jurassic</skos:prefLabel>
<skos:prefLabel xml:lang="fr">Jurassique</skos:prefLabel>
<skos:scopeNote xml:lang="en">208000000 BCE - 144000000 BCE</skos:scopeNote>
<skos:scopeNote xml:lang="fr">208000000 av. J.-C. - 144000000 av. J.-C.</skos:scopeNote>
<skos:definition>-208000000/-144000000</skos:definition>
http://www.open-world.ch/restapi/V2/thesaurus/chrono.php?id=3185443"/>
http://www.open-world.ch/restapi/V2/thesaurus/chrono.php?id=3185455"/>
http://www.open-world.ch/restapi/V2/thesaurus/chrono.php?id=3185460"/>
http://www.open-world.ch/restapi/V2/thesaurus/chrono.php?id=3185465"/>
http://www.open-world.ch/restapi/V2/thesaurus/chrono.php"/>
</skos:Concept>
</rdf:RDF>
________________________________
From: "REYNOLDS, Trevor" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Friday, 2 October, 2009 12:11:56
Subject: Re: BC dates [Scanned]
We use MimsyXG and there we store both a text date field (e.g. "2nd century BC", "Early Medieval", "1st January 1836") we also store an earliest and latest year value. So for the examples above you get:
Earliest -0200 Latest -0101
Earliest 0401 Latest -1066
Earliest 1836 Latest 1836
These allow a certain amount of quick sorting. It also means that we can do a search for everything that might be eighteenth century by looking for
Earliest year <= 1800 and Latest year >= 1701
We haven't got our collections on-line yet but I'm hoping that when we do we will be able to do something that does this sort of search behind the scenes. However I would want to display -0200 as 200BC.
NB using a - sign for BC dates is part of the ISO standard for representing dates.
Trevor Reynolds, Registrar
English Heritage, 37 Tanner Row, York, YO1 6WP
+44 (0) 1904 601905
________________________________________
From: Museums Computer Group [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of John Benfield [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 02 October 2009 10:38
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: BC dates [Scanned]
> 15/03/0057
I am curious to know how many BC objects have a known day and month?
John Benfield
Head of Digital Media
The Royal Shakespeare Company
01789 272351
07825 397387 mob
P Please consider the environment before printing this email.
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