Pete Ciuffetti has given me permission to quote his private mail:

In your levels of granularity, what do you think about allowing year-only, "YYYY" and year-month "YYYY-MM". This would help solve a need I perceive in our database design at SilverPlatter. Most of our records are bibliographic and they specify the date of publication for some described item like a book or journal. Typically this is just a year, like "1997" or it is a year and month, "Feb 1997", sometimes a day is specified.

In my metadata, I'd like to store whatever granularity that makes sense for the published item and I would like all the dates to conform to a standard. But no standard seems to consider these broader levels of granularity.

ISO 8601 does. I would be very happy to add these options to the profile.

Also, in these broad levels for comparison purposes, I suggest implied values would be 01 for an unspecified month, and 01 for an unspecified day.

For the moment, I have backed away from suggesting how dates of differing granularities be compared, as it is contentious.

Regards, Pete Ciuffetti SilverPlatter

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