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Linked Open Data Development at the Canadian Heritage Information Network - Développement en données ouvertes et liées au Réseau canadien d'information sur le patrimoine
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Should we try to avoid date qualifiers? #51

Open illip opened 4 years ago

illip commented 4 years ago

In the current version of the TM (2.1), we use P79_beginning_is_qualified_by and P80_end_is_qualified_by:

It is also possible to add qualifiers to dates with the properties P79 beginning is qualified by and P80 end is qualified by in conjunction with an rdfs:Literal. Such qualifiers can include commentaries (e.g. presumed date) or typical qualifiers (e.g. circa, BC, etc.).

I was wondering if we should advocate against this pattern if it's easy for the institution to transform their qualifiers into date ranges. Let's say an institution have "Before 1910" and they know it cannot be more than 10 years before, I believe it would be more interesting to use P82_at_some_time_within (a and b) with 1900 instead of 1910 with a date qualifier. This would help to generate more accurate timelines for instance.

Of course, this is not a simple task for the institution because the range can change according to the context. However, giving the opportunity to use the qualifiers without mentioning the option of extending the time-span will lead the users towards the simpler pattern instead of the more relevant one.

What do you think?

Habennin commented 4 years ago

It is hard to stop people from using date qualifiers because it is a well known practice and often times the notions of circa etc. are very fuzzy. There will be high and justified resistance to telling people that they must express all of their information with exact dates. That being said, you can have your cake and eat it too, if you put the date as written by the researcher/documentalist as an appellation of the time span and then have a standard way of transposing an approximative date (from a certain date sort) into dates (using the falls within pattern as you suggest).