Greetings,
Many thanks to the folks who advised on adapting ISO-8601 to accommodate seasonal date declarations. Thanks also to Eileen Quam for passing along my request to this list. As I will be developing a few intranet/ web publishing applications based (loosely) on DC over the next few months, I though it wise to subscribe to this group myself and eavesdrop on the development of the standard.
For those interested, here is the tweak I will using to "solve" the ISO-8601/Season issue as it pertains to the citation database I am building:
Seasons, quarters, and multiple-month declarations (i..e January-February) will be mapped to the "day" number space, using digits above 31. For example:
"Winter 2000" becomes "2000-12-35"
"Fourth Quarter" becomes "2000-10-40"...
Translation from these corrupted ISO dates to the intended string is accomplished via a quicky Perl subroutine at the time of database retrieval/display. Date creations are done with drop down menus to limit the need for the data-entry people to understand the mapping.
If anyone is interested in using or critiquing it, I have posted the subroutine code at: ftp://www.mnplan.state.mn.us/pub/date_swap.pl
I would be particularly interested in hearing if anyone with more experience in this area can predict problems with this workaround which may plague me in future years.
Cheers,
Andrew Koebrick
Web Coordinator/Librarian
MN-Planning (Office of Strategic and Long Range Planning)
658 Cedar St., Suite 300
St. Paul, MN 55155
651-296-4156 phone
651-296-3698 fax
"Whenever I see an adult on a bicycle I no longer despair for the human race." -- H.G. Wells
www.mnplan.state.mn.us
|