Robin wrote: > I was looking at a series of photos of Mt St Helens prior to its eruption. It > struck me that the date and time recorded were part of a context. It was > crucial to know that it was 2.00pm on 29th June 1999 at Mt St Helens in the > US. If the date and time are converted to another local time they lose their > meaning, unless you are bright enough and have enough information to convert > the time back to what it would have been.
Oh... good point. In this particular case, it would have been better to store the time with a proper timezone designator so that there was enough information to restore the date to the creator's local time, but we're still lacking the information that says "this date ought to be viewed in the creator's local time, or the local time of the region in which the event occurred". (also, in the case of photos, I know that JPEG exif metadata doesn't store timezone designators without some extra work, so often you'll get dates that are still in original local time, but have no timezone offsets) I see Mark put it better than me anyway: On 1 July 2010 02:34, Mark H. Wood <mw...@iupui.edu> wrote: > The problem is that sometimes the most useful time zone is that of the > context of the object, and sometimes it is that of the user. The > software *cannot* know which is correct; only the user knows. Thus, > no matter what zone we use, sometimes conversion will be wanted. Depending on how rich/accurate the metadata you get from depositors is, and how fancy you want to make the interface, there may still be ways to allow this user-level context selection. Any "View this date in X timezone" features in UIs would still require something like an encoding scheme for metadata values so that dates could be properly detected. -k. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by Sprint What will you do first with EVO, the first 4G phone? Visit sprint.com/first -- http://p.sf.net/sfu/sprint-com-first _______________________________________________ DSpace-tech mailing list DSpace-tech@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspace-tech
