<div class="gmail_quote">The Olson zoneinfo database and CLDR are the closest thing that presently exist to a standard for timezones, but they are de facto standards, not de jure standards administered by any kind of official international standards body.</div>
<div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">If it would be useful for your internal purposes, there is certainly enough information in the Olson data to construct "roll-up" timezones for yourself where the ISO-3166-2 code, GMT offset, and DST rules are all presently identical. But as I mentioned below, you should expect such entities to be rather fluid, and you should prefer to base your implementation on the full fidelity Olson timezones. Such "roll-up" timezones would be finer grained entities than CLDR metazones, since the only requirement for metazones is that they must have the same display labels. Individual Olson timezones within a CLDR metazone may have different DST rules and may belong to different regions.</div>
<div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">Also, on the topic of future proofing, you should be prepared for the fact that new Olson timezones are added from time to time whenever a subregion of an existing zone changes its time definition independently of the rest of that subregion. This happened during the recent timezone change in Argentina where America/Argentina/Salta split off from America/Argentina/Cordoba. Any Olson update could thus potentially require updates to your boundary definitions.</div>
<div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">-Scott</div><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 10:48 AM, Martin Barnes <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:barnes@yahoo-inc.com">barnes@yahoo-inc.com</a>></span> wrote:</div>
<div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
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<p><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy">Thanks Scott. This is very useful insight.</span></font></p>
<p><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy">I am really only ever concerned with
expressing the current timezone for any given place and less worried by any
need to relate to any historical dates and times. </span></font></p>
<p><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy">Consequently it was my hope to use a
sanctioned standard that identified timezones as regions with the same
political definition (ISO region code), the same UTC offset and the same DST
rules but that ignored any historical context; whereby I could find and group all
places that exhibited and experienced the same current time behaviour (such as
all the cities in China belonging together).</span></font></p>
<p><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy">But it appears that no such standard
exists. Furthermore, and as you point out in the Argentina example, using the "pure"
Olsen is recommended in view of the frequent changes that are both "official"
as decreed by governments and "unofficial" as adopted by local
usage. Having these zones pre-defined as boundary map objects allows us a
better degree of future-proofing against changes to come. That is good enough
for me.</span></font></p>
<p><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy"> </span></font></p>
<p><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy">I guess if I need to I might be able to
create relationships between zones that behaved the same at any given point in
time I might want to look at the CLDR metazones, albeit with some caution.</span></font></p>
<p><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy"> </span></font></p>
<p><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy">Thanks for your time and help.</span></font></p>
<p><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy">-Martin</span></font></p>
<p><font size="2" color="navy" face="Arial"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy"> </span></font></p>
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<p><b><font size="2" face="Tahoma"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Tahoma;font-weight:bold">From:</span></font></b><font size="2" face="Tahoma"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Tahoma">
Scott Atwood [mailto:<a href="mailto:scott.roy.atwood@gmail.com" target="_blank">scott.roy.atwood@gmail.com</a>] <br>
<b><span style="font-weight:bold">Sent:</span></b> 04 December 2008 17:24<br>
<b><span style="font-weight:bold">To:</span></b> <a href="mailto:tz@elsie.nci.nih.gov" target="_blank">tz@elsie.nci.nih.gov</a><br>
<b><span style="font-weight:bold">Cc:</span></b> <a href="mailto:tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov" target="_blank">tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov</a>; Martin Barnes<br>
<b><span style="font-weight:bold">Subject:</span></b> Re: Time Zone naming</span></font><span lang="EN-US"></span></p>
</div><div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c">
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"> </span></font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">To the best of my knowledge, the Olson database itself does not define
any kind of "roll-up" timezones. The closest thing I am aware
of is the CLDR concept of "metazones" which group together Olson
timezones that share a common display string, like "Eastern Standard
Time". However, I believe these metazones can include timezones that
have different DST rules.</span></font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"> </span></font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">Rather than try to use "roll-up" timezones, from personal
experience, I would urge you to use the full Olson timezone list if possible.
World timezone rules are highly dynamic and change with surprising
frequency. And it is not uncommon for two Olson timezones to have the
same GMT offset and DST rules in one release of Olson, but then have different
rules in a future release. The example that you cite, Argentina, is
an excellent example. Until just a few weeks ago, all of Argentina was
effective under the same set of time zone rules, but when the central
government decided to observe DST this year, several of the states decided to
remain in standard time. An application that had assigned
"America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires" to everyone in Argentina
regardless of their actual Olson timezone would have broken.</span></font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"> </span></font></p>
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<div>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">Also note that it can be useful to maintain the separate timezones if
your application needs to format and display historical dates and times, as in
logging or transaction history. Timezones that have the same GMT offset
and DST rules today may have had different rules in the past, and having the
most accurate timezone means you could display the historical records correctly
as well.</span></font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"> </span></font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">-Scott</span></font></p>
</div>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"> </span></font></p>
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<p style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt">From: Martin Barnes [mailto:<a href="mailto:barnes@yahoo-inc.com" target="_blank">barnes@yahoo-inc.com</a>]<br>
Sent: Friday, November 28, 2008 11:48<br>
To: <a href="mailto:tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov" target="_blank">tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov</a><br>
Subject: Time Zone naming<br>
<br>
I have a question related to the accepted standard for expressing the<br>
"Olsen" name where multiple zones exhibit the same
"behaviour" in terms<br>
of belonging to the same country, having the same UTC offset and exactly<br>
the same DST rules.<br>
<br>
For example, it appears that all clocks within all locations within<br>
Argentina
will have the same time all year round. The 12 zones reveal<br>
the same behaviour. The same is true of China and a number of other<br>
countries.<br>
I have been aware of the concept of a "consolidated" or
"preferred" time<br>
zone which is a combined zone that takes the name of the most important<br>
location (eg. "America/Buenos_Aires" in the case of Argentina)<br>
<br>
Do these combined "super" zones exist? If so, is there information<br>
available that indicates how the individual zones roll up?<br>
<br>
My enquiry relates to a need to provide information that can identify<br>
the correct timezone for every place (city, postcode, county, state, etc<br>
etc) on earth via a back-end mapping service that calculates the spatial<br>
relationship between the place coordinate and the timezone boundary.<br>
I am looking to build up an accurate timezone boundary map essentially<br>
using existing map objects as building blocks.<br>
<br>
Many thanks<br>
-Martin Barnes<br>
______________________<br>
GeoData Manager<br>
Yahoo! Geo Technologies<br>
Geo Informatics team<br>
London</span></font></p>
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<p style="margin-bottom:12.0pt"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span style="font-size:12.0pt"><br>
<br clear="all">
<br>
-- <br>
Scott Atwood<br>
<br>
Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia. ~H.G. Wells<br>
<br>
</span></font></p>
</div></div></div>
</div>
</blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Scott Atwood<br><br>Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia. ~H.G. Wells<br><br><br>