CODEWITHSUNDEEP
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IssaRice
IssaRice

Reputation: 381

What does dcterms.date denote?

I was reading James Donnelly's answer to "Is there a standardized (Meta?) Tag for the Date of a Website?". At the end he writes:

I don't believe Hangy's answer of dc.date (now dcterms.date) would be relevant here as, as far as I'm lead to believe, the date of this is the date associated with the resource. For example, if the resource was a discussion about the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the dcterms.date could be set to 1066. The same could also be said for icas.datetime.

The definition of dcterms.date is "A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource." I think the question is whether this "event in the lifecycle of the resource" means an event discussed within the resource, or an event pertaining to the resource itself.

Looking around, I found an example of the use of dcterms:date:

ex:myManuscript dcterms:date "1633"^^dcterms:W3CDTF .

The use of 1633 in the example leads me to believe Donnelly's interpretation is right (especially since the other examples on the same page use dates in the 2000s).

However, reading this post, I also discovered that Dublin Core has a dumb-down principle. Quoting from the post:

The solution to the paucity of Dublin Core elements was this thing called “qualified Dublin Core” (although that term doesn’t seem to be used much any more), in which the fifteen core elements are qualified to make them more specific — for example, dateAccepted, dateAvailable and dateCopyrighted are refinements of the core element date. According to the Dublin Core’s own dumb down principle, “a client should be able to ignore any qualifier and use the value as if it were unqualified […] Qualification is therefore supposed only to refine, not extend the semantic scope of an Element.”

This leads me to believe that Donnelly's interpretation is incorrect.

So my question is: What is the correct interpretation of Dublin Core's definition of dcterms.date?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 2493

Answers (1)

unor
unor

Reputation: 96607

There are two ways how the DCMI Metadata Term date can be used in HTML5 documents:

  • in meta-name elements (in the head element), because it’s registered as MetaExtension:
    dcterms.date
  • in URI-based structured data syntaxes (typically RDF serializations like RDFa or JSON-LD, but possibly also Microdata):
    http://purl.org/dc/terms/date (with the RDFa Initial Context: dc:date or dcterms:date)

In the latter case, you can differentiate if you are talking about the document or about the thing the document represents. You just have to give the thing a URI (see more details in my answer).

In the former case, HTML5 doesn’t allow this differentiation. The HTML5 specification defines that a meta element with the name attribute represents "document-level metadata"; "it sets document metadata". So unless it’s defined otherwise for the keyword dcterms.date (which doesn’t seem to be the case), the date should be associated with the document, not the thing.

Upvotes: 2

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