Daniel Friesen wrote: > I'm working on a DateTime library, AnyDateTime > <http://svn.nadir-point.com/viewvc/php-projects/trunk/AnyDateTime/>. The > plan is to have a library that can cover nearly any possible time or > date in history. The AnyDateTime library has a storage format which uses > 22 characters, and sorts correctly in the database.
Interesting! Are you going to convert between different calendars? IMO it's a complete waste, ISO8601 is the one true format. But everyone implements the edge cases like years > 9999 and year "0" differently, see notes at http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#dateTime > ????????????0501?????? would be understood as May 1st. Or are you going to make people enter dates in your nifty format? You could make it somewhat user-friendly just by putting the same dividers that ISO8601 uses, thus ????????????-05-01T??:??:?? It only adds 5 characters... > The range of possible dates this library can cover is from > 99,999,999,999 00:00:00 B.C.E. to 999,999,999,999 23:59:59 C.E. Another way to handle dates far back in the past is to use Mya (million years ago, which is just a conversion for the custom unit Type:Time. See e.g. http://sandbox.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Property:Geologic_time I assume you're not bothering with timezone support and I wonder if it can work with Simile:Timeline. You could still claim your datatype isNumeric, converting to a slightly inaccurate float just for SMW's collation. On the other hand, if you stick with string, SMW's "LIKE" comparator for strings would let you query for [[event::~????????????0501*]] to find "everything happening on May 1st" whether it's got a year and time or not. > Hmm, rather than an overcomplicated output setup, I'm probably going > to create a small format for outputting. One that works with Gregorian > and Julian bases. Otherwise I'll overload with possible formats of outputs. A while back you could control Type:Date in query results and with [[Property:display_units]] to specify a "custom unit" that was really a strftime() formatting string, thus |?Date of birth#%b %d=Birthday in a query would display "Sep 3". It was cool, it's broken now, but I incoherently think an explicit Property:Has_display_format that each datatype interprets is the way to go. How will you export as RDF? A while back a datatype could not export as xsd:dateTime in some situations and then as xsd:string in others. > Quite simply, the idea is to be able to make use of it in Semantic > MediaWiki as an alternative date format. That way it's available for > anyone covering historical dates and such. Denny wrote: > There's also a student of ours working on something close to it, > although I am not totally informed about the status. Since I don't know > if Fabian is on this list, I'll CC him. I think it would still be useful for someone to extend Type:Date to support dates beyond the range of the PHP timestamp (and support timezone, and use the user's Date & time format preference, ...). I think the thing to do in Date:Time is detect when you're at the edge of the range and then do some simple timestamp= (YYYY + (12 * (MM + 31 * (DD + 24 * (HH + 60 * (MM + 60 * SS) to turn it into a large number. Again, only bother doing this for ISO8601 dates. Good luck y'all, and despise me because I know more details than I can code. Damn armchair commenters :-) "Tonight I'm going to party like it's 1999-12-31T23:59:59 !" -- The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. -- =S Page ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Semediawiki-devel mailing list Semediawiki-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/semediawiki-devel
