On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 3:55 PM, Michael Smethurst michael.smethurst@bbc.co.uk 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