Re: PublicationEvent for quarterlies and other odd cases

Hmm... this makes datePublished sound sort of like our "key date", which is the sortable date that best approximates the publication date.  The difference being that "key date" is never shown to end users.  Indexers see it when they add an issue, but it's usually auto-generated from the publication date and only needs to be edited if there's something unusually strange about the publication date.
When an end user is searching for a comic, they will search by "Spring 2013" and/or expect to see that sort of date in the results if that is how the publication date is printed on the comic.  They will definitely not be looking for "2013-03" or "March 2013".  So I am concerned about moving the user-oriented date to an "alternate" field.
Squishing all of the random strange "dates" that publishers come up with into a sortable proper date field is, to me, an implementation detail of sorting** and not what we want to highlight.
Also note that "date of publication" (whether it comes from the indicia/colophon or cover) is not the same as "release date", which is always a proper date.
thanks,-henry
**I'm glossing over a lot of subtleties with sorting- when showing the order of issues in a series, we do not directly rely on key date, for instance.
      From: Richard Wallis <richard.wallis@dataliberate.com>
 To: Henry Andrews <hha1@cornell.edu> 
Cc: "public-schemabibex@w3.org" <public-schemabibex@w3.org> 
 Sent: Friday, October 9, 2015 8:17 AM
 Subject: Re: PublicationEvent for quarterlies and other odd cases
   
I would suggest that datePublished is probably the best place to put the date of publication: YYYY or YYY-MM etc. (2015 or 2015-04).
As to cover date, my inclination is to see that more as a name or alternateName, or maybe even a short description, which handle all sorts of variations: "The Obscure Journal - Spring 2014 Issue",  "The Obscure Journal: May-October 2012".  As these would be described as PublicationIssue(s), perhaps with an exampleOfWork link to a Periodical description, such names would make sense.
~Richard.
Richard WallisFounder, Data Liberatehttp://dataliberate.com
Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/richardwallis
Twitter: @rjw



On 7 October 2015 at 07:09, <hha1@cornell.edu> wrote:

Hi folks,
  Looking at the PublicationIssue and PublicationEvent, I'm confused as to where to put the cover date and how to represent dates that don't map directly to the ISO format.  Quarterlies are the most obvious, but bi-monthlies and semi-monthlies are other examples.  I'm also confused as to whether this should be in "datePublished" (as a date) or "publication" (as a PublicationEvent, which could indicate a quarter by giving a startDate and endDate of the relevant months, perhaps?).
  I don't see an example of anything other than a fully specified date- is there a more comprehensive set of date examples somewhere?  Defining a PublicationEvent that spans the whole time designated by the cover date seems to be the most flexible option, but perhaps that is stretching the concept of "Event" too far.
  "releasedEvent" seems like the clear home for the actual release date(s), which are easier as they are full dates.
thanks,-henry