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dwc:month examples have text, do I assume we really only want the numeric?

Open debpaul opened this issue 1 year ago • 11 comments

Greetings @tdwg/dwc

See examples for term dwc:month Examples: 1 (January). 10 (October).

  • [x] I'm guessing we really only want the numeric, not the text string? yes?

  • [x] Suggest we add Comment, as in
    Comment: For a given month, example for January, enter only a 1 in this field, or for February a 2.

  • [ ] OR do we want always two digits (01)?

And then in the Example: 1

debpaul avatar Mar 15 '23 21:03 debpaul

Only the numeric representation please. Numeric months are readily machine readable and globally accessible.

ben-norton avatar Mar 15 '23 21:03 ben-norton

These are worthy suggestions and I welcome a term change request for them. We do not want to suggest 01 as that suggests a string rather than a number even if in most encoding schemes the value would be text. We could go all out and have: Example: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 (and no other values)

tucotuco avatar Mar 15 '23 21:03 tucotuco

I support the all out approach.

ben-norton avatar Mar 15 '23 21:03 ben-norton

@tucotuco since this is just a change to the example, we don't need to do anything else, right? Just edit the text?

debpaul avatar Mar 15 '23 22:03 debpaul

No, we decided after the 2021 public review that even non-normative changes that are not errata should go through public review because the Maintenance Group alone might not have enough insight across the diverse panorama of Darwin Core usage. These are not errata. The bonus is that it improves awareness of the changes.

tucotuco avatar Mar 15 '23 23:03 tucotuco

So @tucotuco do you want to create the review ticket? Or would you rather I try to do it? If you want me to do it, please point me here to where I do to a) do this and b) the format? Thanks!

debpaul avatar Mar 15 '23 23:03 debpaul

@debpaul I could do it easily, but it might not be a bad idea to use you to test if the documentation is clear and simple. Let me know if that is OK. This document, linked to from the main Darwin Core GitHub page and we have this open issue about making it more obvious how to contribute directly from the most popular document, the Quick Reference Guide.

tucotuco avatar Mar 15 '23 23:03 tucotuco

@debpaul I could do it easily, but it might not be a bad idea to use you to test if the documentation is clear and simple. Let me know if that is OK. This document, linked to from the main Darwin Core GitHub page and we have this open issue about making it more obvious how to contribute directly from the most popular document, the Quick Reference Guide.

@tucotuco i will try — good practice.

debpaul avatar Mar 16 '23 00:03 debpaul

Isn't this already OK?

http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/month

1 (January). 10 (October).

Many of the examples show pink fixed-width example values and black proportional-width explanations.

MattBlissett avatar Mar 16 '23 10:03 MattBlissett

The current definition as @MattBlissett mentioned is clear to me. However, I still get datasets with zero padded months (e.g. 01, 02, 03 etc) from data providers who are familiar with Darwin Core.

So I support the all out approach as @tucotuco suggested.

ymgan avatar Mar 16 '23 11:03 ymgan

Isn't this already OK?

http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/month

1 (January). 10 (October).

Many of the examples show pink fixed-width example values and black proportional-width explanations.

@MattBlissett Hm. (Probably just me then, but I found it confusing as if I could put 1 (Janurary) in the field. I see the other terms you are referring to that use a similar strategy. I don't know what's best here. We could also just say in the Comment: Please do not put leading zeroes.

debpaul avatar Mar 16 '23 15:03 debpaul