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 (https://dwc.tdwg.org/list/#dwc_eventDate) that should work; particularly look at the last two. As well, the Exiv2 Web site (https://exiv2.org/tags-xmp-dwc.html#:~:text=8601%3A2004(E).-,earliestDate,-Event%20Earliest%20Date), recommends using ISO 8601:2004(E) which was replaced by 2019 which defines a very wide range of terms, particularly in the extensions (abstract (https://www.iso.org/standard/70908.html)) (sample (https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/en/#iso:std:70908:en)). Also as reference, the Dublin Core spec defines "date (https://www.dublincore.org/specifications/dublin-core/dcmi-terms/#http://purl.org/dc/terms/date:~:text=dc/terms/contributor)-,Term%20Name%3A%20date,-More%20details)" to include the extended date/time format (https://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/) 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
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
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.)
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