Dates with only DD/MM or MM/YY

We are planning to use UBL for a large project that unifies many different organizations. These organizations have data in various forms. SOme of these organizations store their dates as either DD/MM or MM/YY format.

These dates appear both as dates as well as part of periods. I reviewed date types in UBL- but did not find one that can support dates which contain only day-month or month-year.

What is the best way to support dates in this format? Is their any types already defined or someone have come across this? The dateTypes and Period Types in UBL are derived from xsd:date - which apparently contain all three components of date.

Need some help from experts here !!!

Your comment is best posted to UBL-Dev ... please see http://www.oasis-open.org/mlmanage/ for how to register.  There are many people on that list who would be willing to answer questions, plus that as you can see on http://ubl.xml.org/forum the UBL-Dev list is the designated place for discussions.  I invite you to ask this question again on UBL-Dev.

In your situation, as with anyone else using UBL, you are constrained to using the unqualified data types assigned to each of the BBIEs in the data model.  Each community of users must adopt a mapping of their own data model to the UBL data model.

Thus, it is up to your community to select a mapping of DD/MM or MM/YY to a valid lexical value for the BBIE to which the value applies.  If the BBIE is expecting a full date value, you need a convention for ignoring the missing component in the mapping, but providing the missing component in the lexical value.

You don't cite what the semantics are of these partial date values.  If the BBIE for these values does not already exist in UBL, then you can put them in an extension.  When designing the extension, you can then choose one of the unqualified data types for your custom BBIE.

But .... xs:gMonthDay and xs:gYearMonth are not available to you as unqualified data types in UBL.  While you *could* introduce such data types in an extension, I would not recommend it.  I would simply adopt a value convention for a text field and put the values in there.  It would then be up to your application to validate the content rather than rely on the schema to validate the content.

What more can you say about these values?  In which UBL elements did you want to place these values?

I suggest you flesh out your post to UBL-Dev with answers to these questions.

Thanks for asking!

. . . . . . . . . Ken

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