At 11:16 -0500 30/07/09, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> 1) Machine readability.
This begs the question.
raises the question. begging questions is assuming the answer in the
premise of the question.
Why do you need machine readability for the
dates in the Darwin journals? More specifically, why do you need
machine readability in a standardized fashion currently expected to be
used primarily for adding dates to calendars?
It allows you to build databases with timelines, that span documents
on the web from diverse sources.
2) Consistency across websites that mark up dates.
What form of consistency? Date format consistency? This varies by
use-case, region, and language. Machine-format consistency? You then
have to answer why such consistency is important - what does it let
you *do*?
It would allow you to determine that *this* event reported in an
arabic text with a date referring to a caliphate was actually almost
certainly *before* this *other* event reported in a byzantine text
with a date that is on the indiction cycle. The experts in arabic
and byzantine texts individually might well have the skills to
convert these dates to a uniform day-labelling system, whereas the
interested reader might have the skills in one or the other, but
maybe not both (or perhaps even, neither).
--
David Singer
Multimedia Standards, Apple Inc.
