Dublin Core Date Working Group Session Minutes, DC-2006, Manzanillo, 6 October 2006
Present
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Eric Childress (co-chair) – OCLC, USA
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Douglas Campbell (co-chair) – National Library of New Zealand, New Zealand
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Ann Apps – University of Manchester, UK
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Nancy Brodie – Treasury Board of Canada, Canada
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Robina Clayphan – British Library, UK
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Makx Dekker – DCMI
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Christine Frodl – Die Deutsche Bibliothek, Germany
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Charles McCathieNevile – Opera Software, Norway
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Hans Overbeek – ICTU, Netherlands.
Meeting summary
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Eric announced he is stepping down from the co-chair position, Douglas agreed to continue as sole chair.
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“Short form date format” W3C draft note proposal by Charles – Charles got a fair way through creating the note and generated some discussion on the listserv, but there are still some issues outstanding (documented in the paper) and Charles no longer has time to develop it any further.
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As part of the new DCMI structure for technical work, the Date Working Group will deactivate and be replaced with a Task Group. Douglas, Eric, and Charles agreed to be members of the Task Group. They will prepare a charter, workplan, and call for participation to DC-General after the meeting.
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Those present felt the existing DC-Date listserv should be continued and formally allow observers interested in tracking the developments of the Task Group, but that members of the Task Group should not be expected to provide date-related support – any such queries should be re-directed to DC-General.
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Those present held detailed discussions about existing and upcoming work.
Discussion notes
Short form date format proposal
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Should send it to who asked for it (DC-Lib) to get comments.
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DC-Lib’s purpose/aim was to be able to place dates from MARC records into Dublin Core records without having to convert their format.
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There may be other needs for this format besides DC-Lib?
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It appears Julian dates are not allowed under ISO 8601, but the intention was to make it a strict profile of ISO 8601.
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The document says don’t use this if you’re just starting out, that W3CDTF may be more appropriate.
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This format is to solve an immediate problem. We possibly may move away from it once we fully understand the wider requirements and what an appropriate “smorgasbord” of encoding formats may be.
Requirements for a DC Date Format
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If the resulting date format is useful enough, there is an opportunity for wide take-up and publicity for DCMI – may need to look beyond just the DCMI requests for requirements.
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Want easy-to-read requirements, e.g. “can write a date when don’t know exactly what it is”.
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Ask DCMI groups (and wider) – what actively want (priorities), what’s missing, only one sentence per requirement.
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Some applications decided to use separate “start date” and “end date” as it is easier to process than a single integrated date format. Could just have these as date refinements and Application Profiles re-label as appropriate? Dangerous?
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Need to make more liaison points, e.g. ePrints Working Group, maybe externally too.
Making new refinements for date
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Question by Ann about date received and date completed as refinements
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Received date is critical for legal deposit in British Library
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Germany has a lot of date refinements for legal milestones, eg. patent
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Government Application Profile used to have a “date acquired” refinement at some stage
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Should these refinement questions be deferred elsewhere?
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Ann was really just interested whether anyone else was using similar refinements she could re-use
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The Usage Board has considered date refinements, the danger is where do you stop? Everyone has their own slightly different situation, so might end up with 25 refinements that are almost the same. Really want to see what people are implementing then look at those that bubble up
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Would be good if this was stated widely
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A guideline might be useful, e.g. for date, define your lifecycle date requirements, try to reuse existing refinements for them, etc.
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Problem is how do you learn about similar other lifecycles in existence – wider question than dates, e.g. registries are evolving for this very reason
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DC-General may be the best place to question for now (Ann did this, only got a couple of responses)
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If see something bubble up should notify the Usage Board
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Decided there are no resources in the Date group to look at developing guidelines.