Re: Review request: Time Ontology in OWL

Phil Archer scripsit:

> The original work only supported the Gregorian calendar and a major
> motivation for the New WG to take up the work has been to handle
> other calendars or Temporal Reference Systems. These include things
> like geological time but also other calendars in use around the
> world - hence this request for your review.

The following comments reflect only my personal views, and have nothing
to do with the I18n WG or anybody else.

1) Unix time should rightly be known as Posix time..

2) Posix time is not a count of seconds since a particular epoch,
because it excludes leap seconds.

3) There is no discussion of leap seconds anywhere.

4) The Allen and Ferguson interval relations are not specific to temporal
relations, and ought to be put in their own namespace so that they can
apply to arbitrary intervals (spatial intervals, numeric intervals, etc.)

5) The Maya Tzolk'in (ritual) calendar does not fit the ontology.
It separately counts the days of a 13-day period and the names of a
20-day period.  As an analogy, it is as if we numbered the days of
2012 as Sunday 1, Monday 2, Tuesday 3, etc. without any month names.
When both cycles come back into concurrency after 260 days, the next
ritual year starts.

6) Typos in the geological epoch chart:  Quanternary for Quaternary,
Creataceous for Cretaceous.

7) The whole idea that there is an identifiable instant separating
geological periods is Just Wrong.  Even if we knew when these transitions
happened, we wouldn't be able to describe them.  In the Devonian, for
example, the year had 400 days.  The transitions are inherently vague.

8) The time zone system is too complex as well as too simple.  It should
be aligned with the IANA time zone system, which divides the world into
some 400 zones, each of which (except the purely oceanic zones) occupies
part or all of a given country, and which is based on timezone as well
as DST transitions at various instants.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan@ccil.org
        Is it not written, "That which is written, is written"?

Received on Thursday, 14 July 2016 01:57:40 UTC