Re: Circa. dates

Sort of like a FuzzyDate with an implicit less-than-one truth/certainty
value (that's still ISO8601 parseable)?
On Feb 28, 2015 11:55 AM, "Wallis,Richard" <Richard.Wallis@oclc.org> wrote:

>  Hi all,
>
>  With colleagues I have been looking at how we might handle historical
> approximate dates in Schema.org.  The initial requirement being to be
> able to describe an old book or manuscript published say in approximately
> 1765.  A common need in the bibliographic world, with the normal string
> based solution being “circa. 1765”, or “c. 1765” - Wikipedia providing
> some examples <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circa>.
>
>  The knee-jerk reaction was to suggest some sort of
> approximateDateCreated property for CreativeWork which would not only help
> us bibliographic folks but also those in museums and galleries with similar
> date approximation needs.
>
>  Broadening the analysis it became clear that this need could be
> applicable in most any case where you would expect a Date
> <http://schema.org/Date> in the range of a property.  birthDate,
> deathDate, dateCreated, datePublished, foundingDate, all being all
> potential candidates for Circa style dates.  Rolling things into the future
> you could imagine other examples such as wanting to describe the last
> serviced date of a vehicle being circa 2013.
>
>  So how to solve this in a simple, yet generic, way?
>
>  We could take advantage of the default "if you haven’t got a specified
> type for a property, a Text is acceptable” pattern in Schema, and just put
> in a text string with a defined format: “c.1765”.
>
>  Perhaps a more appropriate solution would be to define a new data type,
> to be added to the range of suitable properties.
>
>  My pragmatic (KISS and don’t break stuff) view of this leads me to
> suggest a new data type named ‘circaData’, or maybe 'approximateDate' as a
> subType of Date.  With descriptive information in the Type definition
> explaining why/how you would use it in the use cases I describe above.
>
>  This approach would add this important functionality, for those
> describing old stuff, without the need for major upheaval across the
> vocabulary, and would at least default to a date for those that do not care
> or look for such approximation aspect of dates.
>
>  ~Richard
>
>