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Now first of all thank you very much for this nice contribution! We are aware of the limitations of Type:Date and would very much like to extend it considerably in future versions (after 1.0, since it is a lot of work). The goal would then be to have one single time datatype that can handle today's meeting schedules as well as times around the beginning of the universe (I assume both of our temporal estimations of this event should be in scope ;). More comments inline below. On Donnerstag, 13. Dezember 2007, Temlakos wrote: > Everyone: > > Attached is a script I wrote for defining a new data type for Semantic > MediaWiki. I call it the "Historical date." > > The Date datatype (available in SMW 1.0 RC1/2) uses a signed 32-bit > integer to store the number of seconds before or since the Unix Epoch > (midnight on New Year's Eve 1969-70). That limits its usefulness to most > of the twentieth century and barely more than a third of the > twenty-first. In 2038, we are /going/ to have another dating crisis when > the Unix Era tops out. Yes. The new Type:Date is scheduled to appear strictly before that. > > I am an administrator and developer on CreationWiki: > > <http://creationwiki.org/> > > Our site is an encyclopedia. And one of the topics we treat is ancient > history. /Very/ ancient history. And certainly history going back > further than the twentieth century according to the Gregorian calendar. > > To that end, I reinvented the date type, with these premises: > > Instead of a 32-bit signed integer, I use a 64-bit signed /float/. > > Instead of "number of seconds before or since the UNIX Epoch", I store > the number of /days/, and the fraction of a day, since noon (UTC) > Monday, January 1, 4713 BC (Julian calendar). This is the /Julian Day/ > best known to astronomers. > > Instead of a preconfigured UNIX-string parser, I wrote my own parser, > using regular expressions to screen and parse either an ISO-8601-style > date string or the usual kind of date that an editor might write. > > I declared a number of static private arrays, each containing the names > of the calendar months in various languages. These happen to be the > languages into which our site has expanded, but of course I know of no > reason why this data type oughtn't to support names given in Russian or > Slovak or any other language into which you might wish to translate SMW > as a whole. > > To convert dates back and forth between Julian days and the usual year, > month, and day values, I borrowed some algorithms from John Walker at > <http://www.fourmilab.ch>. He has explicitly declared that all his > scripts and algorithms are in the public domain. > > You will find that the attached PHP script is completely self-contained; > all you need is to make a "hook" in SMW_DataValueFactory. (I use _hda to > distinguish it from _dat.) You also would need to add some lines to all > the language-support scripts to support the new data type. I have > already created a number of properties with my new data type, and it > works very well. I invite you all to read a few articles to see how I > have used the new type: > > <http://creationwiki.org/Nebuchadnezzar_II> > > <http://creationwiki.org/United_Kingdom> > > The latter has a nifty demonstration of a table built entirely with an > inline query. Notice how I find the names of three ancient kings and > sort them in the order of their accession to the throne. Very nice work. I have to check this in more detail to understand how all of this was done (and possibly to include it into 1.0 later on). I have some ideas in mind how to deal with partly specified dates (e.g. year only, but no day or month) without assuming a default, and I would like to merge this with your solution on calendar conversion and date parsing. It might be that this will have to wait until after 1.0 though. > > Now here is my problem: I want to use my new data type with the Simile > implementation of the Timeline inline-query format. But I have a > problem: Simile Timeline seems to want a numeric value in seconds; I > want to supply a numeric value in days. Worse yet, Simile Timeline seems > to want a 32-bit integer, whereas I have a 64-bit float. When I tried to > specify the Timeline format, I got an unreadable broad band labeled with > dates in recent history. > > Any insights you can give me would be greatly appreciated. AFAIK Timeline can in principle also visualise times in other formats, or even to completely different kinds of numeric data. But the SMW-TimeLine adaption scripts probably do not support any way of specifying this in wiki pages. But it could be done. See [1] for an example (currently broken for me, but works on other people's machines); anyway the employed data at [2] uses no seconds, though the Timeline parameters for that are found in the HTML file. For more Timeline support, David Huynh of MIT CSAIL is probably the person to contact. Best regards, Markus [1] http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/examples/dinosaurs/dinosaurs2.html [2] http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/examples/dinosaurs/dinosaurs.xml > > Sincerely, > > Terry A. Hurlbut > Sysop > <http://creationwiki.org/> > > PS: In case you're wondering, I of course release this file under your > present licensing terms, which I believe are GPL version 2.0. Thanks, it will surely be useful. (Though I think the GPL does not leave you much choice on that anyway; unless of course you chose to not publish it at all ;-) > > TAH -- Markus Krötzsch Institut AIFB, Universät Karlsruhe (TH), 76128 Karlsruhe phone +49 (0)721 608 7362 fax +49 (0)721 608 5998 [EMAIL PROTECTED] www http://korrekt.org
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