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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:

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 RangeRepresentation
100 CE -- 999 CE0100 -- 0999
10 CE -- 99 CE0010 -- 0099
1 CE -- 9 CE0001 -- 0009
1 BCE0000
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.

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