[API-users] API change proposal: supporting ranges in occurrence eventDate

[Adriaan van Os]

Matthew Blissett via API-users wrote:

> We propose changing the eventDate field in the GBIF API to support ISO 
> 8601-1 date ranges. A range will be returned where one was provided by 
> the publisher, either directly as a range in the |eventDate| field, or 
> through a combination of the |year|, |month|, |day|, |startDayOfYear| 
> and |endDayOfYear| fields.

I welcome the change. I recall the discussion "Occurrence Inventories" of April 29-30, 2019, 
reproduced below.

What will happen to existing data sets, where  January 01 at 00:00 is listed for unknown dates or 
date ranges ?

Regards,

Adriaan van Os

------

On 26/01/2019 12:19, Adriaan van Os wrote:

 > > Matthew Blissett wrote:
 > >
 >> >> The documentation isn't particularly clear, but you can create the
 >> >> month chart using the search + facet API:
 >> >>
 >> >> https://api.gbif.org/v1/occurrence/search?facet=month&facetLimit=12&limit=0
 >> >>
 > >
 > > As an example, I looked at the flight time of Nymphalis antiopa, which
 > > is known to be around April-May and August-September. The GBIF
 > > Occurrences per Month chart
 > > 
<https://www.gbif.org/occurrence/charts?has_coordinate=true&has_geospatial_issue=false&taxon_key=5130682> 

 > > shows a lot of occurrences in January. I tracked these down to Finish
 > > datasets with eventDate January 01 at 00:00 but for a valid year.

This is an unfortunate limitation of our current system.  We're working
on an improvement as part of a larger effort to update our occurrence
indexing, but for the moment month-only or year-only dates are indexed
as the first of the month/year.  We don't add an issue flag to these
dates, but even if we did, another limitation of the API is it's not
possible to exclude issues in the fast searches or charts.

We can't set an event date of e.g. 2016-00-00, as that's not a valid ISO
format date, but we can look at leaving the "month" and "day" fields empty.

Regards,

Matt


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