Alois Treindl is not on the time zone mailing list; direct replies appropriately. --ado -----Original Message----- From: Alois Treindl [mailto:alois@astro.ch] Sent: Sunday, January 28, 2001 11:11 AM To: tz@elsie.nci.nih.gov Subject: quality of historical zone information Hi my company is an astrological computer service, and as you certainly know, astrologers are the only group of people for whom precise timezone information for any place, and any historical time is really essential. This is also why Thomas Shanks had created the International and American atlas. Tom is long gone from ACS, and they no longer maintain their database properly. Your site has become the essential source on timezone information. However, for historical work your data are insufficient in many areas. For example in Germany, there must be about 20 zones differentiated which have had a different timezoen history since the introduction of standard time. Th tz database has only a single zone info for Germany. For many other countries the same is true, e.g. for France, where there is a complicated historical pattern, especially during the years of the World War II and german occupation. Many US states have a very complex timezone history, and for some states several hundreds of 'zones' will be needed to reflect these data precisely. Defining more zones will not be enough. it must be possible to associate every populated place with the right zone. For example in the case of Germany, each village or city must be associated with one of the zones. Current organisational units, like districts or 'Laender' are not sufficient for that, because some towns have changed this association occasionally in the past, i.e. have changed the 'land' or disctrict to which they belong. I would like to see the tz-database become THE reference source for this kind of information, but it is a long path of work. I might be able to contribute to this efffort, particularily after my scheduled retirement in mid-2002. I would like to know whether there are any plans of a systematic nature to improve the quality of historical work in the TZ database. Best regards || Alois Treindl, Astrodienst AG, mailto:alois@astro.com || Zollikon/Zurich, Switzerland || Free astrological charts at http://www.astro.com/ || SWISS EPHEMERIS Free Edition at http://www.astro.com/swisseph/