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- Time zone handling.
Assumptions
Scope
- 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, moved, or covered by conservation activities; dates and times related to an insurance contract or shipping manifest; or dates and times that temporary access permissions might be granted to a Principal.
The service will not attempt to model dates and times, or named time periods, that might be encountered in the context of Annotatations, such as the European Renaissance or the Mesozoic Era.
Calendars
- This service will default to using the Gregorian Calendar system. It may be possible, during implementation, to abstract this to more readily allow the use of other calendar systems (e.g. Islamic, Hebrew).
Date and Time Formats
- This service will inherently accept any of several widely-used input formats for dates and times, and potentially allow customization - based on regular expressions or similar patterns - that will allow the use of other date and time formats.
- For input date and time formats where years are represented with fewer than four digits (required to unambiguously designate years in the Gregorian Calendar), default assumptions about assigning these dates to a century will be used and documented.
- The default output format for dates and times, unless otherwise customized for a locale or institution, will be one or more default profiles of ISO 8601, the International standard for date and time formatting. (A 1997 W3C Note, Date and Time Formats, provides some suggestions for selecting these profiles.) There are two excellent general introductions to the ISO 8601 standard:
- Markus Kuhn, A summary of the international standard date and time notation
- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, Info on ISO 8601, the date and time representation standard
- This behavior generally confirms with Jon Postel's maxum, "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send."
Time Zones
- Deployments of the CollectionSpace service may be hosted in a different time zone than users of the service.
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