Encoding an incomplete date as xsd:dateTime

Hi all,

xsd:dateTime and xsd:date are used frequently for encoding dates in RDF, 
e.g., for birthdays in the vcard ontology [1]. Is there any best 
practice to encode incomplete date information, e.g., if only the birth 
*year* of a person is known?

As far as I can see, the XSD spec enforces the provision of all date 
components [2], but "1997-01-01" seems like a semantically wrong way of 
expressing that someone is born in 1997, but the author does not know 
exactly when.

Thanks,
Heiko

[1] http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#dateTime
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#date

-- 
Dr. Heiko Paulheim
Research Group Data and Web Science
University of Mannheim
Phone: +49 621 181 2646
B6, 26, Room C1.08
D-68159 Mannheim

Mail: heiko@informatik.uni-mannheim.de
Web: www.heikopaulheim.com

Received on Monday, 10 February 2014 14:37:47 UTC