webschema-ISSUE-16 (Add an Uncertain Date/Time mechanism): ISO8601 doesn't support imprecise dates, useful for cultural heritage, historical data, geneaology [Feedback on Schema.org]

webschema-ISSUE-16 (Add an Uncertain Date/Time mechanism): ISO8601 doesn't support imprecise dates, useful for cultural heritage, historical data, geneaology [Feedback on Schema.org]

http://www.w3.org/2011/webschema/track/issues/16

Raised by: Dan Brickley
On product: Feedback on Schema.org


Use cases.

1. Cultural heritage information (Museums, Libraries, Archives)

" The current processing rules in the specification do not handle many valid ISO8601 dates. As dates and ambiguity about dates is important for describing cultural heritage materials, hopefully the HTML5 processing rules can be adjusted to handle more valid ISO8601 dates. It seems as if the WHATWG has accepted a proposal to support year only dates, which is a start." [...]
"Another kind of property a cultural heritage organization might like to add to a landmark or building like the Memorial Tower are the events related to the building. In this case the cornerstone was laid in 1922 and the tower dedicated on November 11, 1949. Other buildings could have events in their history like the dates they were designed or dates of renovations, derived from the drawings and project records. Museums may be interested in various events in the history of a painting including provenance and restorations. History museums and historical societies may also want to refer to various historical events that relate to their exhibits.", 
Jason Ronallo in http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/6400HTML5 Microdata and Schema.org (Code4Lib Journal, Issue 16, 2012-02-03, ISSN 1940-5758).

2. Historical data (e.g. geneaology)
"Schema.org, Microformats, and Microdata all rely on the ISO 8601 date format, which does not support approximate dates. Review the Library of Congress's Extended Date and Time Format, which extends ISO 8601 and allows uncertain and approximate dates." [...]
http://historical-data.org/


Design options

The historical-data.org initiative (whose schema is a strong candidate for inclusion at schema.org once such integration issues are resolved, see also http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/HistoricalDataSchema ) suggests use of the Library of Congress "Extended Data and Time Format".

See http://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/

Review comments on the suitability of this approach for schema.org's handing of imprecise dates would be useful.

Received on Thursday, 17 May 2012 08:35:43 UTC