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Document Dates

Flagging for 1.06 / 2.02:

In reviewing documents on DevTracker I realised with a long document list it was hard to work out which the most recent documents were. E.g. there were many 'Annual reviews' against a project with similar filenames, but no way of working out which was the 2014 review.

Providing a field for the date of each document-link would be useful to allow interfaces and users to ascertain which the most recent documents are.

Alternatively, without an extra field, guidance could be added to encourage including dates within filenames (although this is less likely to see successful implementation I suspect...)

 

 

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9 Comments

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    IATI Tech Team

    This item has been moved to the '2.02 Decimal Upgrade Proposals' forum for inclusion the upcoming decimal upgrade.

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    Herman van Loon

    Would be usefull as an optional element, since a lot of documents can be published against 1 activity.

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    Bill Anderson

    I agree that this is a useful addition. I suggest we add document-date as a new optional element under document-link in both activity and organisation standards

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    IATI Tech Team

    This proposal has been discussed amongst the IATI Technical Team following the end of the initial suggestion phase of the v2.02 upgrade.

    The IATI Technical Team supports this proposal.  Further updates on work towards the practical implementation of this proposal into the version 2.02 of the IATI standard will be posted as part of this thread.

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    Rolf Kleef

    Would it make sense to (also?) allow to specify the period covered by the document? That would make it possible to query for both results and documents over, for instance, Q3 2015.

    It could be an optional element like in results:

    <period>
      <period-start iso-date="2013-01-01" />
      <period-end iso-date="2013-03-31" />
    </period>
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    John Adams

    I agree with a single document-date. In response to Tim's original issue we have updated the document title with the published date (or a close proxy - date last modified in our EDRM).

    Rolf, I think adding a period element would be over-complex and for publishers with automatic feeds from EDRM and other repositories would be almost impossible, much easier if people are manually managing documents. I therefore don't think you'll get completeness or coverage for that. For those cases where a document covers a period and that is important, just include that in the title.

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    IATI Tech Team

    Please see below for the technical implementation that is suggested in the Version 2.02 - Formal Proposal:

     

    New element: document-link/document-date

    • A new element will be created: document-date

    • Example

    <document-link format="application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text" url="http:www.example.org/docs/report_en.odt">
      ...

      <document-date iso-date="2013-10-05" />
     </document-link>

    • Add definition:
      Element: ‘The date of publication of the document that is being linked to.’
      Attribute @iso-date: ‘This attribute is required. This value should be of type xsd:date.

    • Add guidance:
      ‘Document date would normally be the production or published date of the relevant document to identify the specific document version’

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    IATI Tech Team

    This proposal has been added as a GitHub issue, for inclusion in the version 2.02 development branch of the IATI-Schemas: https://github.com/IATI/IATI-Schemas/issues/265

    Guidance will also be added in the version 2.02 development branch of IATI-Extra-Documentation: https://github.com/IATI/IATI-Extra-Documentation/issues/303

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    IATI Tech Team

    This proposal has now been incorporated into a version 2.02 code repositories (see the above GitHub issue links for technical details). The relevant pages on a development version of the 2.02 reference and documentation site is available to view here:

    We welcome scrutiny on the implementation of this proposal and encourage the community to feedback and suggest solutions for any errors, omissions and problems. This should be done before Monday 7 December, when the process will commence to release version 2.02 as a live version of the IATI Standard. More information on the inspection phase is available here.

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