Re: created, issued, modified [Re: comments on Atom 0.2]

[Evan Martin <martine@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Aug 08, 2003 at 01:57:24PM -0700, Jeremy Gray wrote:
> First, it is worth nothing that these are not "yours[mine]/Danny's
> definitions": These definitions are provided by Dublin Core, and we'd
> be best served by adhering to the definitions and most common
> interpretation thereof.

(see below)

> Pepys' Diary provides both a good example and a bad example simultaneously.
> Good in that it raises a number the issues well, bad in that one of the
> issues it raises is tied to that of re-publishing or perhaps what one might
> call true syndication and depends, of course, on one's interpretation of
> re-publishing, syndication, and their relation to the effort going on at
> pepysdiary.com. I say "bad" only because such re-publishing or syndication
> may or may not be within the scope and definition of the Dublin Core terms
> we're considering, and as a result may or may not affect potential
> interpretations.

I only brought it up to better present the date issue.  If you're
claiming it's troublesome because of dates, take a more simple and
common case:
I go to the mountains for a week but bring my laptop.  I write one entry
each day and save them locally, and when I get home I upload them all
simultaneously.
There's definitely a difference between the timestamp that represents
when I wrote those entries and the timestamp for when they go up on my
website.  I think we all agree on that, and the discussion here is which
dc attributes correspond to which of those dates.

I used Pepys' Diary as an example just because the difference in these
two dates is easier to see.  It's also a good example for the optional
time zone issues because I doubt he included a time zone when dating his
entries.


> In terms of pepysdiary.com, my understanding would be that issued would be
> the timestamp for the moment at which pepysdiary.com published an excerpt
> from the diary. Created would be used to indicate the original creation date
> for the content being posted, 1660/08/07, for example.

Hmm, really?

Ok, so going back to what I wrote before:
>  - created is the "real" create time;
>  - modified is the "real" modified time;
>  - issued is whatever time the person wants to say the post came from.
Would it be correct to invert these definitions of "created" and "issued"?

In that case, what we've been agreeing upon has been wrong, including
the validator; it is *issued* that must have a timezone, and it is
*issued* and modified that are redundant when a post has never been
modified.


Here's what Dublin Core says:
 created  Date of creation of the resource.
 issued   Date of formal issuance (e.g., publication) of the resource.
(http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/)

By my reading of those definitions, I think we had it right.  But as you
wrote above, the most common interpretation is the one we should follow,
and I'm certainly open to being set straight.

I guess my confusion here is:
 - Is the "resource" the entry itself?  Then Pepys' entries were created
   hundreds of years ago.  Or the resource the web-accessible resource
   as you published it, putting their create date within this year?
 - Similarly, is the formal publication of the resource the actual date 
   the entries went up on the web?  Or is it the date Pepys decided to
   tag on his entries back as he was writing them?

Armed with just those definitions, I just asked my coworker here at
LiveJournal what he thought the right interpretation was and he got the
opposite interpretation (the one you presented) from me.

-- 
Evan Martin
martine@xxxxxxxxx
http://neugierig.org