There are a number of eggs in the air regarding the date element. They
include:
1. its name,
2. its semantics,
3. its granularity,
4. dates before the introduction of the Georgian calendar.
This mail deals only with point 3. If at all possible, I'd like to settle
the granularity issue. The current wording on the DC Web site is:
[The semantic definition goes here]
Recommended best practice is an 8 digit number in the form YYYY-MM-DD
as defined in http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime, a profile of ISO 8601.
In this scheme, the date element 1994-11-05 corresponds to November 5,
1994. Many other schema are possible, but if used, they should be
identified in an unambiguous manner.
On September 29 I mailed a suggested wording which allows the various
granularities permitted by the profile. I have seen no replies on the
meta2 list and don't know whether this indicates agreement, disagreement
or boredom. The suggested wording is:
[The semantic definition goes here]
Recommended best practice is a date encoded according to
http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime, a profile of the ISO 8601 date
encoding standard. The profile supports a number of levels of
granularity, ranging from a year (eg 1997), through a complete date
(eg 1997-07-16), to a complete date plus hours, minutes, seconds and a
decimal fraction of a second. In those cases where an ISO 8601 date
format is not suitable (eg the date precedes year 0 of the Christian
Era), an appropriate scheme should be used and identified in an
unambiguous manner.
Comments?
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Misha Wolf Email: [log in to unmask] 85 Fleet Street
Standards Manager Voice: +44 171 542 6722 London EC4P 4AJ
Reuters Limited Fax : +44 171 542 8314 UK
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Fifth DC Metadata Workshop, 6-8 Oct 1997, linnea.helsinki.fi/meta/DC5.html
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