Wrong use of Timestamps in EmotionML

Hello EmotionML-Team,

in EmotionML 1.0 W3C Working Draft 7 April 2011 I found two problems
with the use of timestamps.

First problem
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In section 2.4.2.1 (Timestamps - Absolute time) the definition says that
the attributes "start" and "end" indicate the number of milliseconds
since 1970-01-01 0:00:00, but the example below seems to use a normal
unix timestamp (1268647200 = 2010-03-15 10:00:00 - a moment during the
definition of EmotionML). Same use in example of 2.4.2.2 (Duration).
That a unix timestamp is meant shows 5.1.2 (Automatic recognition of
emotions) with "23 November 2001 from 14:36 onwards (absolute start time
is 1006526160 milliseconds since 1 January 1970 00:00:00 GMT)".
"1006526160 seconds" will be the right here.

Second problem
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With the help of a unix timestamp or a timestamp defined as
xsd:nonNegativeInteger no moments before 1970 can be defined. This
includes that no moments bevor christ can be used. So e.g. “emotional
diaries” of a poets like Friedrich Schiller or Gaius Iulius Caesar can
not be annotated in their real time.

Possible solution
-----------------
I inspire to use xsd:dateTime
(http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#dateTime) instead of
xsd:nonNegativeInteger for the attributes start and end of <emotion>.
With the help of this we can annotate also dates before 1970 and bevore
christ also with fractional seconds.


I hope this can help EmotionML to become a famous W3C-Recommendation.

Gerhard Fobe
Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany

Received on Tuesday, 21 June 2011 22:45:06 UTC