Draft profile of ISO 8601

[Misha Wolf]

Pete Ciuffetti has given me permission to quote his private mail:

> In your levels of granularity, what do you think about allowing year-only,
> "YYYY" and year-month "YYYY-MM".  This would help solve a need I perceive
> in our database design at SilverPlatter.  Most of our records are
> bibliographic and they specify the date of publication for some described
> item like a book or journal.  Typically this is just a year, like "1997" or
> it is a year and month, "Feb 1997",  sometimes a day is specified.
> 
> In my metadata, I'd like to store whatever granularity that makes sense for
> the published item and I would like all the dates to conform to a standard.
> But no standard seems to consider these broader levels of granularity.

ISO 8601 does.  I would be very happy to add these options to the profile.

> Also, in these broad levels for comparison purposes, I suggest implied
> values would be 01 for an unspecified month, and 01 for an unspecified day.

For the moment, I have backed away from suggesting how dates of differing
granularities be compared, as it is contentious.

> Regards,
> Pete Ciuffetti
> SilverPlatter

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Misha Wolf            Email: misha.wolf at reuters.com     85 Fleet Street
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