"prior to"

Markus Kuhn Markus.Kuhn at cl.cam.ac.uk
Wed Jan 14 11:13:49 UTC 1998


Ken Pizzini wrote on 1998-01-13 11:54 UTC:
> There is a shade of meaning difference between the two: in
> non-technical situations the term "before" can be used to
> mean "up to and including", whereas "prior to" never seems
> to accrete the "including" meaning.

There was in the first draft of ISO 8601:1998 an annex C that tried
to standardize the precise technical meaning of such terms. However
it seems that this annex has been removed from the current second draft
<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/8601v03.pdf>.

The terms (as originally proposed in some CEN Medical Informatics working
group proposal) were:

  Reference time interval:                  ---------------->

  AT                                        ---------------->
  
  BEFORE                       ------->
  AFTER                                                         ------->

  DURING                                         ----->
  INCLUDES                     ---------------------------------------->

  CO-CONTINUES                              --------------------------->
  CO-PRECEDES                  ----------------------------->

  CO-STARTS                                 ---------->
  CO-ENDS                                        ----------->

(Make sure you use a monospaced font to display the above!)

It seems that this CEN proposal is somewhat restricted and incomplete,
but the discussion here suggests that it might nevertheless be a good
idea to have such a specification for technical discussion about temporal
structures. Better proposals?

BTW: The above proposal contradicts your interpretation of "before".

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Security Group, Computer Lab, Cambridge University, UK
email: mkuhn at acm.org,  home page: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>





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