Godmar,
I'm surprised you're asking this. Most of the questions you want
answered could be answered by a basic programming construct: an
if-then-else statement and a simple decision about what you want to
use in your specific application (for example, do you prefer "text"
with the period, or not?). About the only question that such a
solution wouldn't deal with is "which fields are derived from which
others", which strikes me as superfluous to your application if you
know a hierarchy of preference. But perhaps I'm missing something
here.
Roy
On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 7:39 AM, Godmar Back <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 11:14 PM, Roy Tennant <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>> On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 2:14 PM, Godmar Back <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>
>>>Similarly, the date associated with a record can come in a variety of
>>>formats. Some are single-field (20080901), some are abbreviated
>>>(200811), some are separated into year, month, date, etc. Some
>>>records have a mixture of those.
>>
>> In this world of MARC (s/MARC/hurt) I call that an embarrassment of
>> riches. I've spent some bit of time parsing MARC, especially lately,
>> and just the fact that Summon provides a normalized date element is
>> HUGE.
>
> That's great to hear - but how do I know which elements to use?
>
> For instance, look at the JSON excerpt at
> http://api.summon.serialssolutions.com/help/api/search/response/documents
>
> "PublicationDateCentury":[
> "1900"
> ],
> "PublicationDateDecade":[
> "1970"
> ],
> "PublicationDateYear":[
> "1979"
> ],
> "PublicationDate":[
> "1979."
> ],
> "PublicationDate_xml":[
> {
> "day":"01",
> "month":"01",
> "text":"1979.",
> "year":"1979"
> }
> ],
>
> Which one is the cleaned up date, and in which order shall I be
> looking for the date field in the record when some or all of this
> information is missing in a particular record?
>
> Andrew responded to that if given, PublicationDate_xml is the
> preferred one - but this raises the question which field in
> PublicationDate_xml to use: .text, .day, or .year? What if some are
> missing?
> What if PublicationDate_xml is missing, then I use or look for
> PublicationDate? Or is PublicationDateYear/Month/Decade preferred to
> PublicationDate? Which fields are derived from which others?
>
> These are the types of questions I'm looking to answer.
>
> - Godmar
>
