Augment Dates
If your data has any of the following date formats, you may augment the data in this stage to allow plotting on a timeline when building a Viewshare View in a later stage:
International unambiguous, Y2Ksafe formats such as:
YYYY (eg 1997)
YYYYMM (eg 199707)
YYYYMMDD (eg 19970716)
YYYYMMDDThh:mmTZD (eg 19970716T19:20+01:00
A subset of ISO 8601 dates (as prevalent in LC MODS):
YYYDDMM
YYYYDDMMhhmmss
Also basic US convention, Y2Ksafe year dates:
The range of dates that Viewshare can manage is from 9998 BC to AD 9999.
Dates before the common era should be represented as a negative number, by subtracting the number of years BC from 1 and prefixing a "-" minus sign (in other words, assume a year 0 which represents the year 1 BC, and a year -1 which represents the year 2 BC).
-YYYY
For dates with a year between 998 BC and AD 999, leading zeros should be added to pad out the year to four digits.
MM/DD/YYYY
The range of dates that Viewshare can manage is from 9998 BC to AD 9999.
Dates before the common era should be represented as a negative number, by subtracting the number of years BC from 1 and prefixing a "-" minus sign (in other words, assume a year 0 which represents the year 1 BC, and a year -1 which represents the year 2 BC).
-YYYY
For dates with a year between 998 BC and AD 999, leading zeros should be added to pad out the year to four digits.
Year Range | Representation |
100 CE -- 999 CE | 0100 -- 0999 |
10 CE -- 99 CE | 0010 -- 0099 |
1 CE -- 9 CE | 0001 -- 0009 |
1 BCE | 0000 |
10 BCE -- 2 BCE | -0009 -- -0001 |
100 BCE -- 11 BCE | -0099 -- -0010 |
1000 BCE -- 101 BCE | -0999 -- -0100 |
10,000 BCE -- 1001 BCE | -9999 -- -1000 |
For simple years, you do not have to augment the dates to use them in the timeline and other date-oriented views: you need only change the type in your dataset to date/time.
To augment your date data so that it may be placed on a timeline:
- Click the "Add a Field" button on the Describe screen toolbar in the "Field Name" column.
- Provide a name for the new field in the text box at the top of the screen, for example: Augmented Date.
- Click on the timeline image to indicate the type of view the data will be used in. The current field names of your data are displayed on the right. By clicking the "+", choose the field that contains any of the date information listed above. Note: Currently date information must be contained in one
- field to perform date augmentation.
- Scroll down and click the "Create" button at the bottom left hand corner of the data augmentation popup window to create the new field. See Figure 7. [Picture of Data Augmentation Window]
- You will now see a new row in your data profile. Click the "Augment" button on the Describe screen toolbar to generate data values for the new field. If your augmentation is successful you will see dates formatted in ISO 8601 format in the value column.
- If your augmentation is not successful you will receive an error message at the top of the screen. Please copy this error message and start a post in the troubleshooting forums. Be sure to include as much relevent information about your problem in your post.