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

["Jeremy Gray" <jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 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.

Using that example I would say that the timestamp of original creation (i.e.
when you typed the content into your laptop out in the wilderness) is
"created" and the time at which it was published is "issued". The simplicity
of this example only serves to highlight the complexity of and issues with
the Pepys' Diary example.

> 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"?

As long as you write:
 - created is whatever time the person wants to say the post came from
 - modified is the "real" modified
 - issued is the "real" issued time.

But then even that would blend soft, human-oriented timestamps with hard
machine-oriented timestamps in ways that might conflict, depending on
exactly what you mean by "real" as well as on how you choose to interpret
the word "resource" in context of the DC documentation.

> 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.

As long as one ties "modified" to the time at which the modified content was
published in its modified form, as opposed to the time at which the content
itself was modified. The latter of the two appears to be the more accurate
interpretation of the Dublin Core documentation, which ties modified more
closely to created than to issued, by my interpretation.

> 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.

Except that by your statements, you seem to have reversed the two
definitions above.

> 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?

Which one (or combination) is going to be most useful to software processing
the entries that went up on the web? To the humans working with the results
of that software's processing? It's a difficult choice. One that cannot be
clearly made in the face of certain examples.

> 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.

Likely because this is a re-publishing scenario (or is it? In the sense of
any published by any means that DC would care about?), one which makes the
interpretations less clear.

Obviously, what we need most is to determine to what entity are we assigning
these timestamps. The original content? This newly-published version
thereof? If we assume the former, created and issued may well still be
different. Same with an assumption of the latter. And that's without
bringing modified into the picture. :)

My interpreted example attempted to capture a bit of each, admittedly -
creation of the original content together with the published version that a
piece of software would be processing. This may be right, or it may be
wrong, but it, to me and at that time at least, produced the most useful
combination of metadata. I'm willing to rescind that interpretation if it
will help move us forward towards a single interpretation that supports the
most common application scenarios, and let me make the following clear:
Pepys' Diary is not one of them. At least not in terms of helping us
establish a standard that doesn't slide down a slippery slope of
complications surrounding occasional re-publising scenarios, begging a
question regarding Pie/Echo/Atom/Feedcast/whatever's scope (regarding
re-publishing/syndication issues) and usage of the terms currently under
discussion.

Here's a question that might have the potential to drive at least part of
the discussion forward: In your mind, using the Pepys' Diary example, would
ANY of the dates, created, issued, or modified, be in the 1600s?

Jeremy Gray