DarwinCore - eventDate

[Out2Tango]

Hi. I went to use this tag and perhaps I'm not understanding some aspects of the spec or this could be considered a bug.

I see eventDate is represented as the tag, EventDate, which is fine. With how I'm reading the spec, this should probably be a text field vs. a classic programmatic "date" field since it should support things like date ranges and uncertainties. Here are some of the examples that should work; particularly look at the last two. As well, the Exiv2 Web site, recommends using ISO 8601:2004(E) which was replaced by 2019 which defines a very wide range of terms, particularly in the extensions (abstract) (sample). Also as reference, the Dublin Core spec defines "date" to include the extended date/time format which goes beyond a typical computer "date."

Thoughts on changing that field to a text field to support this broader sense of dates? The concept seems too complex for a validation engine, so I feel a simple text field should suffice.

Joe

[Phil Harvey]

Hmm.  This problem is more widespread than just eventDate.

dateIdentified, eventTime, georeferencedDate, measurementDeterminedDate, relationshipEstablishedDate, dateIdentified, modified and eventDate
all recommend ISO 8601-1:2019 according to the specification.

EarliestDateCollected, LatestDateCollected, eventMeasurementDeterminedDate and occurrenceMeasurementDeterminedDate recommend ISO 8601:2004(E).

EventAttributeDeterminedDate, SampleAttributeDeterminedDate recommend the W3CDTF profile of ISO 8601.

I'll have to think about this because it will be difficult to maintain backward compatibility for standard date formats if I make this change.

- Phil

[Out2Tango]

I understand/thanks. FWIW, I'm not married to this namespace for my use case. Perhaps you know about another tag whose meaning is to represent a date span/range that is a text field? (I've considered things like Custom1 but feel there's no context describing the content I would store there.)

[Phil Harvey]

Offhand I can't think of a standard XMP tag that does what you want.  It may be just as effective to create a user-defined tag for this, because I don't see much advantage to using a DarwinCore tag for this (unless you use software which recognizes DarwinCore).

- Phil