comment: Japanese era name system in Time Ontology?

Hello all,

Let me make a comment on 
Time Ontology in OWL [1]
from an I18N point of view.

Per the definition of time:year, the range is xsd:gYear.

However, this may embarrass some/many people in Japan.

I don't know how many of you know, but in Japan,
we have a different year system from the Christian Era:
the era name system.
(maybe some other cultures use other calendar systems)

For example, the year of 2005 was "Heisei 17"
(actually, "平成17年"), the year of 1963 was "Showa 38" (昭和38年).

Here "年" is a suffix attached to year number, telling that the
preceding number indicates a year (year in the time line or year as a
duration).

"Heisei" and "Showa" are names of eras.

And more complexly,　1989-01-07 was in the year of
"Showa 64" (昭和64年) and 1989-01-08 was in the year of
"Heisei 1" (平成元年). 
The series changed from Showa to Heisei after the change of the Emperor.
Here "元" means "the first."

This era system is more than of a daily use in the folk culture, 
all the public documents use (formally) the system.

So it is desired to have options to express the DateTimeDescription
using the era name sytem.

One possible solution would be
to introduce :eraName property as a property of DateTimeDescription:

e.g.

let 1989-01-08 (in Japan) be denoted by

[a :DateTimeDescription;
 :unitType :unitDay
 :day 8;
 :month 1;
 :year 1;
 :timeZone tz:ITZ;
 :eraName era:Heisei].

and 

[a :DateTimeDescription;
 :unitType :unitDay;
 :day 8;
 :month 1;
 :year 1989;
 :timeZone tz:ITZ].

(optionally, one can put :eraName eraName:ChristianEra;
in the second expression)

(I'm not sure if we should make the value of :year in the first
expression "元"^^xsd:string )


There may be better solutions,
and it may be one of the options to make the Christian Era
the only standard era.

But the latter is like to make the GMT the only 
standard time expression...

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-owl-time-20060927/

Best,
Yoshio

-- 
Yoshio FUKUSHIGE <fukushige.yoshio@jp.panasonic.com>
Network Development Center,
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.

Received on Tuesday, 3 October 2006 16:05:13 UTC