Re: [eXist-TEIXML] Encoding dates for use in range index

[Peter S. <st...@we...>]

Hi Chris,

I've been struggling with TEI dates for the same reasons as well: The TEI @when (as well as @from, @to et. al.) is a blend of several datatypes which makes it very hard to work with. My solution has been to a) constrain the possible datatypes to xs:gYear and xs:date in the schema and b) regularize the dates in a concordance file. This file simply lists all my document IDs together with its respective regularized date value (which is xs:date in my case).  That way I can perform all operations on that file only which is pretty fast. (That file should then be updated via e.g. triggers every time there are changes to your documents.)
But I think you can make your life much easier if you constrained your facets to years (which should be a sufficient granularity for bibliographies IMHO)?!
If you go down that road you probably won't need the util:index-keys approach but can simply do a distinct-values on your regularized year values. 

Does that help?
All the best
Peter

 
Am 28.03.2013 um 01:57 schrieb Christopher Thomson <chr...@ca...>:

> Hi all,
> 
> I'm working on obtaining data using util:index-keys in order to build a faceted search filter, as described in this tutorial: http://rvdb.wordpress.com/2010/10/06/mimicking-faceted-searching-in-exist/
> 
> My question relates to dates.  I have been encoding dates using the TEI @when attribute.  However, I understand eXist's range index only works on valid xs:date attributes which need to be YYYY-MM-DD. The data is a humanities bibliography, so largely has publication dates which are year only, or sometimes year-month.  I can see a couple of options, but maybe there are others:
> 
> 1) Index the @when as a string, ie <create qname="@when" type="xs:string"/>. This seems like a good option right now.  As my goal is to create a faceted search interface, I'm not sure if I lose much by recording dates as strings in the index. I want to be able to, say, narrow down search results by decade.  Any thoughts?  If I extract the date strings from my index and create facets, can I then cast them back to xs:date if that proves necessary?
> 
> 2) Use a different attribute for non xs:date conforming date data, eg the TEI has @when-custom as an option for the date element.  The obvious downside to this is it puts my statistics for faceting into two places, ie @when and @when-custom.  The main use case is likely to be, 'Find all publications between these dates', so I suspect the data with year of publication only is going to be the most important to users.
> 
> Does anyone have thoughts or advice on this?
> 
> Thanks,
> Chris
> 

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Peter Stadler
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