RE: Date Representation Best Practice

For date related datatypes, see http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/
For operations on dates, see http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery-operators/
A new version of the latter will be published tomorrow.

All the best, Ashok

-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Davis [mailto:iand@internetalchemy.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 13, 2002 11:35 PM
To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
Subject: Date Representation Best Practice


Hi all,

I'm experimenting with an application that ties people and
historical events together and have a question regarding the
representation of dates. Currently most RDF applications I have seen
use a literal date representation, utilizing one of the various
standard date formats.

However, this representation requires additional date logic within the
RDF application. In order to answer questions such as "In what year
did a man first walk on the moon?" the application must first seek
the date literal for the event and then parse it to determine the
year.

I've been looking at representing the dates as resources. This lets me
make assertions about each date such as year, month and day. To answer
my question above I then ask for the year of the date of the event. I
can also assert other relationships with other dates such as before
and after which should enable me to find the first man on the moon by
finding a moon walk event such that there are no moon walk events
before it.

Aside from the practical considerations of generating resources for
all possible dates, are there any other reasons why one would favour
literals over resources? Will the proposals for data typing literals
cover date relationships?

Ian

Received on Thursday, 14 November 2002 07:29:49 UTC