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xsd:date and xsd:dateTime

Makx DEKKERS
Published on: 31/10/2016 Discussion Archived

Denmark has noticed that the proposed standard in several areas allow for a choice between xsd:date and xsd:dateTime. This is not seen as helpful.
Denmark would prefer that the proposed standard makes a clear choice between the two options. When deciding on which of the two options to choose among, we suggest to allow the statistical cases to determine on which of the two options to use.

 

Issue raised by Julie Richter by e-mail http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/mailman/archives/stat_dcat_application_profi….

 

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Makx DEKKERS
Makx DEKKERS Fri, 04/11/2016 - 14:29

There are two options:

  1. Leave things as they are; the current approach enables data providers to choose the granularity they need -- they can use xsd:date if that is the granularity of their data and xsd:dateTime if they have more precise data -- and receivers need to be able to process either format.
  2. Select xsd:dateTime as the only option, which means that providers that have data on the level of days need to extend their data with some arbitrary time string, so if the data contains "2016-11-04" it should be expanded to "2016-11-04T00:00:00" or "2016-11-04T23:59:59".

The option to only use xsd:date seems to be out of the question as it would make it impossible to express publication of a dataset more than once per day, and if such data exists would require truncating and losing information.

In case of option 2. above, systems that implement StatDCAT-AP would still need to be able to process both formats in order to preserve compatibility with DCAT-AP.

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