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tdwg / attribution

Joint TDWG/RDA group on metadata standards for attribution of physical and digital collection stewardship
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Review start/endDate in Agent extension #9

Open timrobertson100 opened 4 years ago

timrobertson100 commented 4 years ago

There was a lot of discussion for dwc:eventDate which resulted in a single field as opposed to start and end dates. What are the reasons for having a start and end date as opposed to a single field here please?

(I was actually in the minority in the DwC discussion as I preferred the simplicity of start and end dates for e.g. databasing as time ranges weren't widely supported back then. Today, I would probably favour consistency with other date formats within DwC)

pmergen commented 4 years ago

According to past experience and type of records I would keep start date and end date indeed.

At specimen or observation level this has proven quite useful and needed information when bio monitoring is performed for example.

I would support to keep it in and not reduce to just start date. But would be indeed curious on arguments why just have start date at Agent extension ?

Pat

timrobertson100 commented 4 years ago

Thanks @pmergen

Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding for anyone reading this - date ranges are very necessary but DwC eventDate encodes them into a single field.

dshorthouse commented 4 years ago

The only rationale is to borrow from existing terms in schema.org.

rukayaj commented 3 years ago

I've also been wondering about this, it makes more sense to me to have them encoded in a single field. In two fields there's more scope for confusion. If you want to stick to schema.org is it possible to have a bit more explicit guidance for best practice when you only have a single date/datetime, not a range? Logically I think it should go in both, but it would be good to have that spelled out.

Also it might be a good idea to have a date only example as well, so it's clear that it doesn't have to be a time.