On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 3:55 PM, Michael Smethurst
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Not quite on topic but on the subject of uncertainty around dates I've
> worked with a couple of data sets where birth and death dates were unknown
> but activity periods [1] were known. These have either had a separate flag
> called is_flourished (or similar) used to modify born / died or separate
> flourished dates from birth / death

Flourished dates are a useful stake in the ground if the birth & death
dates aren't known, and are sometimes used in addition to birth/death
dates as well, but I think they should be represented by a separate
property.  Eventually one would be able to derive them automatically
from the dates of all known works.

Similarly baptism dates are often used as a proxy for birth dates if
the birth date is unknown, but again I think they should be stored in
a separate property so that the display is "bapt. 2012-12-21" not
"born ca. 2012-12-21," which may be true, but isn't necessarily.

If the date encoding supports open ended ranges, one could map fl.
1340-1360 to born before 1330, died after 1360, to support querying.

Tom

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