Description
A utility service that provides support for date and time operations.
These operations provide support for the temporal attributes of other entities, such as temporarily-granted access permissions; beginning and ending dates of loans and exhibitions; and searching and reporting based in part on date ranges (e.g. "objects accessioned within the last week").
Operations supported include:
- Date and time addition and subtraction.
- Date and time ranges.
- Date and time format conversion, in support of Internationalization and import.
- 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.
- Users of a deployment may simultaneously be located in two or more time zones.
- The core date and time framework/library will require periodic updates to time zone data, as various world governments make changes to that data.
Boilerplate structure and text below
Much of the page structure and text below this point is boilerplate, copied in from the relevant New Service template. Further work is needed to complete this page.
Key Concepts
- Especially things that become common sense, and so usually missed by new reviewers
Dependencies
- Services with potential dependencies on this service include:
- Any entities whose data models include temporal attributes may potentially have some dependencies on this service.
Background Documentation
- If we have notes from community design meetings, link to them here.
- If we have relevant sections in Spectrum or another such document, link to them here (or cite section numbers, etc.)
Key Team Members
- (Name(s) of members) is/are the primary tech team member(s) for this service
- Need to identify the community members acting as Domain Experts.