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Internet-Draft: draft-kunze-temper-01.txt J. Kunze
TEMPER Date Format University of California
Expires 1 February 2008 C. Blair
University of Chicago
1 August 2007
Temporal Enumerated Ranges (TEMPER)
(http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-kunze-temper-01.txt)
Status of this Document
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Distribution of this document is unlimited. Please send comments to
jak at ucop dot edu.
Copyright (C) The IETF Trust (2007). All Rights Reserved.
Abstract
TEMPER (TEMPoral Enumerated Ranges) is a simple date and time syntax
for representing points, lists, and ranges of timestamps. The syntax
is designed to be trivial to parse, easy for humans to read, and
friendly to basic lexical sorting algorithms. Examples:
J. Kunze [Page 1]
Internet Draft TEMPER Date Format August 2007
BCE1212
bce0551
1850~
1952, 1958-1967, 1975
19990916_Z
19990916145903_z
20070401
J. Kunze [Page 2]
Internet Draft TEMPER Date Format August 2007
1. TEMPER Points
A TEMPER point is a string of characters representing a single date
or a combination of a date and a time. Sometimes a point is called a
timestamp. Here are some examples of TEMPER points.
0384 The year 384.
1999 The year 1999.
19990916145903 3rd second past 2:59 PM, 16 September 1999.
19990916145903_z The same time, but in UTC time.
1999091614590312 12 seconds later, no specified time zone.
20041201 December 1st in the year 2004.
There are five different lengths of basic TEMPER points:
CCYY 4-digit year, with CC for 2-digit century
CCYYMMDD 8-digit year-month-day
CCYYMMDDhh 10-digit year-month-day-hour
CCYYMMDDhhmm 12-digit year-month-day-hour-minute
CCYYMMDDhhmmss 14-digit form with hour-minute-second
TEMPER points of 15 digits or more indicate fractions of seconds:
1999091614590312 No fractional seconds.
1999091614590312986 986 milliseconds later.
As a special case, to specify just a year and month without naming a
day in the month, give DD as 00:
CCYYMM00 8-digit year-month, but no day specified
For example,
20070500 The month of May in the year 2007.
A 6-digit form is reserved for a downgraded TEMPER idiom that
expresses a year-month-day with only a 2-digit year (i.e., the
2-digit century is missing):
YYMMDD 6-digit year-month-day (not recommended)
6-digit points are not recommended because they will not sort
correctly unless all the other dates (a) are 6-digit TEMPER points
and (b) have the same implicit century.
1.1. TEMPER Zones
The basic TEMPER point may optionally be followed by an '_'
(underscore) and a zone indicator of either 4 digits or 1-3 digits:
J. Kunze 1.1. TEMPER Zones [Page 3]
Internet Draft TEMPER Date Format August 2007
19990916145903_0000 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
19990916145903_GMT Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
19990916145903_0100 One hour WEST of GMT.
19990916145903_2300 One hour east of GMT.
19990916145903_PST US Pacific Standard time.
19990916145903_edt US Eastern Daylight time.
19990916145903_EDT US Eastern Daylight time.
19990916145903_z UTC (Coordinated Universal Time).
In the absence of a zone indicator, TEMPER does not define a default.
1.2. Approximate and Uncertain Points
Any TEMPER point followed by a `~' (tilde) is interpreted as an
approximate point, indicating ambiguity or fuzziness in the point.
Because the tilde follows the TEMPER point, approximate and precise
dates will be placed together by normal sorting software. There is
currently no way in TEMPER to express the confidence level or the
extent of variation (plus or minus values). Examples:
1066~ Circa the year 1066.
20020800~ August 2002 or thereabouts.
19781201020000~ Around 2 AM on December 1st, 1978.
TEMPER reserves the '?' for expressing uncertain points; the details
of uncertain points are under construction.
1.3. Non-Gregorian Calendars
A TEMPER point may be preceded by the three letters "BCE" for "Before
Common Era" dates. These three ASCII letters express (with no case
sensitivity) "negative" dates, namely, dates that are chronologically
less than the year 0000. Examples:
BCE1212 Death of Rameses the Great.
bce0551 Birth of Confucius.
Note that BCE dates inherently sort in reverse order. But because
"BCE" appears first in TEMPER dates, naive sorting software (e.g.,
Unix "sort" command with no arguments) first places all BCE dates
together as a group, after which the simple intervention of reversing
the order of the group achieves correct chronological order.
TEMPER reserves all 3-letter (alphabetic) prefixes for future use to
indicate Hebrew, Chinese, Islamic, and other calendars; these are
under construction. Although naive sorting will not work between
calendars, use of prefixes will cause sorting to work on groups of
dates that use the same calendar. The prefix "IBA" (from Tagalog) is
defined to mean "other unspecified", as in,
J. Kunze 1.3. Non-Gregorian Calendars [Page 4]
Internet Draft TEMPER Date Format August 2007
IBA 28 May, 2004
2. TEMPER Ranges and Lists
A TEMPER range is a start point and an end point separated by a
hyphen.
1996-2000 A range of four years.
2004- The year 2004 and later.
A missing start or end point indicates an open-ended range. In
general, a missing start point is strongly discouraged because it
disturbs sorting among records from other sources, e.g., shifting a
modern date range so that it appears near prehistoric dates; usually,
it works better at least to approximate the start point.
1860~-1872 Around 1860 and up to 1872.
A TEMPER list is one or more points and ranges separated by commas.
Every point in a list must have the same number of digits; e.g., a
14-digit point and a 4-digit range end point cannot occur in a valid
TEMPER list. Points and ranges in a list may occur in any order.
Here are some examples of lists.
1952, 1957, 1969 A list of three years.
1952, 1958-1967, 1985 A mixed list of dates and ranges.
3. Security considerations
The TEMPER syntax poses no direct risk to computers and networks.
Implementors should always exercise care when receiving data that may
be private or maliciously intended. These are normal risks to which
TEMPER is no more vulnerable than most other syntaxes.
4. Authors' Addresses
John A. Kunze
California Digital Library
University of California, Office of the President
415 20th St, 4th Floor
Oakland, CA 94612-3550, USA
Fax: +1 510-893-5212
EMail: jak@ucop.edu
Charles Blair
Digital Library Development Center
University of Chicago Library
J. Kunze 4. Authors' Addresses [Page 5]
Internet Draft TEMPER Date Format August 2007
1100 E. 57th St., JRL 220P
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Fax: +1 773-702-6623
EMail: chas@uchicago.edu
5. Informative References
[ISO8601] ISO, "Data elements and interchange formats -- Information
interchange -- Representation of dates and times",
December 2004.
6. Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The IETF Trust (2007). This document is subject to the
rights, licenses and restrictions contained in BCP 78, and except as
set forth therein, the authors retain all their rights.
This document and the information contained herein are provided on an
"AS IS" basis and THE CONTRIBUTOR, THE ORGANIZATION HE/SHE REPRESENTS
OR IS SPONSORED BY (IF ANY), THE INTERNET SOCIETY, THE IETF TRUST AND
THE INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS
OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF
THE INFORMATION HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Expires 1 February 2008
J. Kunze 6. Copyright Notice [Page 6]
Internet Draft TEMPER Date Format August 2007
Table of Contents
Status of this Document . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1. TEMPER Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1. TEMPER Zones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.2. Approximate and Uncertain Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.3. Non-Gregorian Calendars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2. TEMPER Ranges and Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3. Security considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4. Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
5. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
6. Copyright Notice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
J. Kunze 6. Copyright Notice [Page 2]
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