Managing art history fuzzy dates: an application in historico-geographical authority

Abstract

Art history data management leads to express dates in a "fuzzy" way, which is not suitable for electronic processing. A standardized easy to use way of coding dates, maintaining all the semantics of the "natural" format, has been defined. Each date is, therefore, expressed (in the extended way) as a string of characters, with a well defined syntax, while it is really managed as a set of fields, which contain in a coded way, the same information that are contained in the extended format. The coded format of dates is easily and transparently managed by every Data Base Management System, allowing selection by exact values or by ranges. This conventional way of managing dates has been tested in the implementation of a DBMS based historico-geographical authority file.