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I am pleased to report that work has begun in earnest to incorporate EDTF into ISO 8601.  ISO recently approved a work item for an "8601 Part 2".   (I don't know if this really means "Version 2", or if there will actually be two parts.)  And so a Working Group has been convened, and I have joined.  Unfortunately I have had to miss the past two calls, when EDTF has been discussed, but from the minutes, it seems that much of it is being well-received. This is all very preliminary of course.

I want to bring to your attention several changes that are being suggested.  These suggestions are tentative as they have not been discussed yet within the group, just suggested.   But I want feedback from this group, if anyone objects to any of these suggestions. (Personally, I think they're fine.)


*         '?' (question mark) currently means "uncertain", '~' (tilde) means "approximate, and '?~' means "uncertain as well as approximate".  The suggestion is to replace the latter with a single character and the suggested character is '%' (percent).


*         'u' means unspecified, and the suggestion is to change that to '!' (exclamation).


*         'y' is used at the beginning of the date string to signify that the date is a year exceeding four digits. The suggestion is to change this to 'Y' (upper case).


*         'unknown' and 'open' : the suggestion is to replace these with single characters, and the suggested characters are '*' and '&'  (asterisk and ampersand).


*         Numeric values for seasons:

Currently:

    *   21 = Spring
    *   22 = Summer
    *   23 = Autumn/Fall
    *   24 = Winter

The suggestion is to rename these four,  and expand the list:
*         21 = Spring - Northern Hemisphere
*         22 = Summer - Northern Hemisphere
*         23 = Autumn/Fall - Northern Hemisphere
*         24 = Winter - Northern Hemisphere
*         25 = Spring - Southern Hemisphere
*         26 = Summer - Southern Hemisphere
*         27 = Autumn/Fall - Southern Hemisphere
*         28 = Winter - Southern Hemisphere
*         31-34 for Q1 - Q4 ( 4 periods of 3 months each)
*         41-43 for Quadrimester (3 periods of 4 months each)
*         51-52 for Semestral (2 periods of 6 months each)
The next scheduled call is Tuesday, June 23, so if you have concerns about these suggestions, please post them before then.
Ray