Discovery Change Proposal-6
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DCP-6: Adopt Dublin Core Date Specification in Atom Response
- Progress (fill in the dates as the process moves forward)
- Submitted on: 2012-02-13
- Review period: 2012-02-13/2012-03-13
- Revision: n/a
- Vote: 4-1 in favor as of 2012-04-10
- Final review: N/A
- Ratified: 2012-04-10
- Facilitator: Clynnes
Description
The DCP-1 specification repurposed the <time:start> and <time:end> elements from the draft specification in OpenSearch for querying on time. However, a more common standard for representing time in XML documents is available, namely the Dublin Core standard element "date" for represent a point in time or a time period. This is, not coincidentally, also the method for representing date-time within the draft specification of OpenSearch for the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).
Problem Addressed
The current ESIP Discovery specification uses a non-standard element for specifying date-time or date-time range. This is an unnecessary deviation from the "mass-market" standard proposed by OSGeo to OGC.
Proposed Solution
The proposed solution is to use the more standard Dublin Core "date" element to represent "a point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource. Further, the dates are proposed to be encoded using the W3CDTF profile of ISO 8601, as recommended by the Dublin Core. An example of such a date is "1997-07-16T19:20:30.45Z". Date/time intervals can also be expressed this way by separating the two date-times by a '/' character: "2007-03-01T13:00:00Z/2008-05-11T15:30:00Z".
As this could cause some disruption to client/server interaction when adopted, I propose that this change be grouped with other DCPs in release 1.2 of the ESIP standard.
Example
For an <entry> item that formerly displayed start and stop time as:
<time:start>2009-01-01T05:23:24Z</time:start>
<time:end>2009-01-01T05:29:24Z</time:end>
the new form would be:
<dc:date>2009-01-01T05:23:24Z/2009-01-01T05:29:24Z</dc:date>
Voting Result
TBD
