[CF-metadata] CF calendars (was: problem with times in PSD dataset)

From: Steve Hankin <steven.c.hankin>
Date: Fri, 14 Dec 2012 15:45:27 -0800

On 12/14/2012 9:35 AM, Jonathan Gregory wrote:
> Dear Cecilia, Steve et al.
>
> Steve is right that mostly we use the Gregorian calendar. That is what I meant
> mostly when I said that the default is the calendar we use. The real world
> is mixed Julian-Gregorian, and I don't think dealing with this calendar is an
> issue only for Renaissance historians. I can't give you examples, but I
> think it is conceivable or likely that at some point people would want to
> record real-world data in CF earlier than the Renaissance, or have already
> done so. For instance, what about astronomical data, such as the dates of
> eclipses. These are real-world events, on precise dates which are translated
> into the mixed Julian-Gregorian calendar.

Hi Jonathan,

If scientists somewhere have encoded the dates of these historical
events as data(*) using a mixed Gregorian-Julian calendar Lord help
'em. Those poor folks have to face an 11 day discontinuity in their own
data, as well as in ours. I'm not meaning to be snarky. I just want to
stamp out this pesky calendar issue. It has been tripping us up for too
many years.

Your points below are definitely the real guts of the discussion, but in
this email I am addressing just the one single point. I'm afraid we
will never heal ourselves from this virus if we do not eradicate it from
our thinking.

      - Steve

(*) attaching a date to an historical narrative is different from using
a date as a time coordinate. It's metadata versus data.
Received on Fri Dec 14 2012 - 16:45:27 GMT