Developing Quality Metadata

9

Times, Dates, Schedules, and Calendars

Matter of Time

Time is not as straightforward to deal with as you might think, especially in broadcast systems. In this chapter, we will look at some time-related problems and discuss some potential solutions. You can find some sample solutions in Part 2 of this book in the tutorials.

Times and Dates

We often use dates and times separately. Computer systems find it most convenient to maintain a single time value that is measured from a reference date and time. The counter increments its value in milliseconds. By rounding the value to whichever unit we want to use and adding that to the reference value we can compute any date or time within the working range.

Dealing with Dates

Let’s consider first how ...