[Treebase-guts] [ treebase-Bugs-3043116 ] DC Date in OAI records has "extra" text

[SourceForge.net <no...@so...>]

Bugs item #3043116, was opened at 2010-08-11 10:53
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by vgapeyev
You can respond by visiting: 
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=1126676&aid=3043116&group_id=248804

Please note that this message will contain a full copy of the comment thread,
including the initial issue submission, for this request,
not just the latest update.
Category: APIs
Group: None
>Status: Closed
Priority: 7
Private: No
Submitted By: Kevin S. Clarke (ksclarke)
Assigned to: Vladimir Gapeyev (vgapeyev)
Summary: DC Date in OAI records has "extra" text

Initial Comment:
Hi, in harvesting TreeBASE, I've noticed the value for the dc:date element in the records has content like: "Published in 1983" instead of a plain date like "1983".  This is valid according to the OAI DC XML Schema, but DC does have a best practice that suggests that the content should just be a date in a standard encoding scheme: "Recommended best practice is to use an encoding scheme, such as the W3CDTF profile of ISO 8601" Cf. http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/

I think putting a date in dc:date that matches a standard encoding scheme would be less likely to cause problems with harvesters that make assumptions about data content based on best practice recommendations (many of the standard OAI tools do this unfortunately).  If you're only using dc:date for publication dates (is it currently used for anything else?) then people who harvest will be able to make that assumption without relying on the "Published in" text.

Thanks for considering this.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

>Comment By: Vladimir Gapeyev (vgapeyev)
Date: 2010-09-16 12:04

Message:
As of SVN#750, the element contains just a decimal for the year, such as
<dc:date>2009</dc:date>. 
This is pulled from CITATION.PUBLISHYEAR field; there is no data in the
record for a more precise date. 
This field is nullable in the DB, so the element is not guaranteed to be
non-empty, although all records in treebase-dev do have a value there. 

----------------------------------------------------------------------

You can respond by visiting: 
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=1126676&aid=3043116&group_id=248804