Background
The iso-date attribute on the activity-date tag is optional.
This is the only machine-readable section of the activity dates.
There are some activities that do not have precise dates because e.g. they are still in the pipeline/identification stage.
Problems
Activity dates cannot be read and used by applications unless there is an iso-date attribute.
Proposal
Make the iso-date attribute mandatory.
Possibly:
make the iso-date attribute fuzzy (perhaps you could just put “2012” rather than “2012-01-01” - I think that would still be ISO-compliant)
add an attribute to define the precision of the date (e.g. “precision”, for which the values could be year, month, day)
Modify activity-date/@iso-date : Make attribute mandatory
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Bill Anderson This is not possible in a decimal upgrade because of the effects on an end user.
But we can alter the guidance on this.
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David Carpenter Because there is broad adoption of these elements by publishers, and tightening up on this attribute would lead to improvements in data quality, we would like to see if it is possible to fit this into a decimal upgrade.
Pushed to 1.03 upgrade for comment.
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Tim Davies This would be very helpful for consuming applications.
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David Carpenter Decimal Upgrades and Backward Compatibility
IATI's decimal upgrades must (as agreed by the Steering Committee) be backwardly compatible. This means that data produced for a particular version of the standard should have the same meaning, functionality and validity in all subsequent decimal versions of the same integer.
We had proposed to make a number of changes in the current decimal upgrade that would have make a number of optional fields mandatory. (These are the iso-date for activity dates, and the period start and end dates for budgets.) It has been pointed out to us that these changes break the backward compatibility test, as activities without these fields created under the current version of the standard would fail validation in the new version.
These items will therefore be placed in the proposal queue for the first integer upgrade.
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David Carpenter Moving to the Integer Upgrade forum
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