I tend to agree that we need to expand the Date scheme just enough more that
we don't turn away two important user communities in scholarly publishing:
1. any discipline needing dates less than 0, eg, history, art, literature,
philosophy, theology, paleontology, archeology, etc.
2. any discipline needing "big numbers" (anyone know the proper term?) for
geological or cosmological time; this may include astrophysicists,
who have been very much in the vanguard of electronic publishing
I'd feel quite uncomfortable telling these disciplines to invent their own
because the DC could not accommodate them.
In order to accommodate, we DC folks would have to get comfortable with
the idea of using a little bit more than a subset (profile) of ISO 8601.
-John
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