...
Operations that may be performed by this service are proposed below. Some of these may be implemented solely as internal code, and have no web services or externally-facing components:
Basic
...
Date and Time Operations
- Date and time addition and subtraction, in part in support of such concepts as "last week," "this month", and "90 days from now."
- Generating timestamps at the current instant.
Date and time ranges
- Calculating the duration of date and time ranges, in support of time-bounded entities, such as loans, exhibits, and temporary access permissions.
- Identifying whether a specific date and time falls before, within, or after a date and time range.
Formatting and validation
- Formatting dates and times, and converting between formats.
- Validating entered dates and times.
Time zones
- Time zone handling.
Named time periods
- Support for Association of named time periods . (This encompasses a great deal, and should be broken out further here.)with calendar systems.
- Identifying whether a specific named time period falls before, within, or after a date instant, or another named time period.
These operations provide support for the temporal attributes of other entities, such as:
- Generating date-related parts of ID numbers.
- Facilitating searches and reporting based, in part, on date and time ranges (e.g. "collection objects accessioned within the last week" or "collection objects scheduled for conservation activity during March 1-20 of the current year").
- Providing notifications at significant time points related to time-bound events, such as loans, exhibitions, and temporarily-granted access permissions.
- Supporting customization (including Internationalization) of displayed and entered dates and times.
- Support for import of dates and times.
- This service will not attempt to represent dates and times, or
Assumptions
...
Basic Date and Time Operations
- This service will apply to system dates and times: the dates and times of meaningful collections management events modeled by the CollectionSpace system, such as the date and time that an object was accessioned, loaned, exhibited, moved, or covered by conservation activities; dates and times related to an insurance contract or shipping manifest; or a date and time range during which temporary access permissions might be granted to a Principal.This service will not attempt to represent dates and times, or named time periods, that might be encountered in the context of CollectionObject metadata or other forms of Annotations, such as "203 BC," "1962 CE," "European Renaissance," "Han Dynasty," or "Mesozoic Era."
If there is a need to support other types of dates and times, or named time periods, this should be carried out by a separate service or code base. For one possible starting place, please see Petras, Larson and Buckland's 2006 paper, Time period directories: a metadata infrastructure for placing events in temporal and geographic context
Calendar Systems
- This service will default to using the Gregorian Calendar system.
It may be possible, during implementation, to create an abstraction layer to more readily permit the use of other calendar systems (e.g. Islamic, Hebrew) for representing system dates and times, in the event that might be a future requirement for the CollectionSpace system.
...
Formatting and
...
Validation
- This service will inherently accept any of several widely-used input formats for dates and times.
...
- Users of a deployment may simultaneously be located in two or more time zones.
- The Date and time instants SHOULD be converted to, and stored in, then-current Universal Coordinated Time (UTC).
- One or more date- and time-sensitive frameworks or libraries in the CollectionSpace system, such as the core date and time framework/library , will require periodic occasional updates to time zone data, as various world governments make changes to that data.
...
| title | Boilerplate structure and text below |
|---|
...
Named Time Periods
- Named time periods refer to named, time-bounded events and/or abstractions such as "World War I", the "European Renaissance," the "Han Dynasty," and the "Mesozoic Era."
- These may occur in the context of CollectionObject metadata, Vocabulary entries; and other forms of Annotations.
Key Concepts
- Especially things that become common sense, and so usually missed by new reviewers
...
- ID Service.
- Notification Service
- Scheduler Service
- Vocabulary Service (named time periods)
More generally, any entity services whose data models include temporal attributes may potentially have some dependencies on this service.
...