Re: getting rid of xsd:dateTime ?

2011/4/5 Pierre-Antoine Champin <pierre-antoine.champin@liris.cnrs.fr>

> Hi all,
>
> there seem to be a recurring problem with dates and the ma: ontology. I
> encountered it, Martin encountered it, I know that Joakim also did...
>
> The fact is that most metadata formats we are dealing with allow dates
> to be more or less precise, like
>
> * just a year
>

in XML Schema, this would be gYear http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#gYear


> * a year and a month
>

this would be http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#gYearMonth


> * a year, a month and a day
>


this would be date http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#date


> * ...
>
> while xsd:dateTime imposes to us to commit to a 1sec precision...
>
> I suggest we change the range of date properties to rdfs:Literal, and
> specify in the documentation that they should be of the form
> YYYY[-MM[-DD[Thh[:mm[:ss[.fff]]]]]], to be interpreted as an incomplete
> date.
>

This would be very bad. RDF in many areas is linked to XML datatypes, see
e.g. http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/#typedliterals , and I would encourage
us to follow this approach as close as possible. To solve your problems, I
would rather say that a date should be one of the above built in XML Schema
data types.

Felix



>
> This hinders interoperability a tiny bit, but not as much as inventing a
> day and an hour for media resources for which we only know the year.
>
>  pa
>
>
>
> To all, some general remarks and conclusions
>
> * as most metadata format are more permissive regarding dates than
> xsd:dateTime, I suggest we simply use rdfs:Literal for all our date
> properties, and explain that it should be of the form
> YYYY[-MM[-DD[Thh[:mm[:ss[.fff]]]]]]
>
>