Extended Date Time Format (EDTF) Edit

EDTF defines features to be supported in a date/time string, features considered useful for a wide variety of applications.

The Extended Date/Time Format (EDTF) was created by the Library of Congress with the participation and support of the bibliographic community as well as communities with related interests.

Date and time formats are specified in ISO 8601, the International Standard for the representation of dates and times. ISO 8601-2004 provided basic date and time formats; these were not sufficiently expressive to support various semantic qualifiers and concepts than many applications find useful. For example, although it could express the concept “the year 1984”, it could not express “approximately the year 1984”, or “we think the year is 1984 but we’re not certain”. These as well as various other concepts had therefore often been represented using ad hoc conventions; EDTF provides a standard syntax for their representation.

Further, 8601 is a complex specification describing a large number of date/time formats, in many cases providing multiple options for a given format. Thus a second aim of EDTF is to restrict the supported formats to a smaller set.

EDTF functionality has now been integrated into ISO 8601-2019, the latest revision of ISO 8601, published in March 2019.

Source

@misc{LibraryofCongress2019,
  title = {Extended {{Date Time Format}} ({{EDTF}}) {{Specification}}},
  author = {Library of Congress},
  date = {2019},
  url = {https://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/}
}