edm:TimeSpan

A period of time having a beginning, an end and a duration. There is a difference between timespans as chronological values (where different skos:prefLabel can be used, e.g., "3200BC" is written "3200AC" is some languages, and all variants for "20th century") and historical timespans (e.g. “Bronze Age”, “Middle Age”) . See Recommendations for providing temporal metadata for some more discussion on the topic.

  • The recommended properties are marked in dark red.

  • The optional properties are left in black.

Please provide the properties in the record in the same order given in this document, the metadata validation performed by Europeana requires this order.

edm:TimeSpan

Property

Description

Value
type

Cardinality

skos:prefLabel

The preferred form of the name of the timespan or period. Although the maximum number of occurrences is set at 1, it can be interpreted as 1 per language tag. At least one skos:prefLabel SHOULD be provided. Several prefLabels with languages tags are strongly recommended for language variants and
translations.
<skos:prefLabel xml:lang="en">Roman Empire</skos:prefLabel>

This is a recommended property for this class.

literal

0....1

skos:altLabel

Alternative forms of the name of the timespan or period.
<skos:altLabel xml:lang=''fr''>Empire romain (27 avant J.-­‐C.-­‐476 après J.-­C.)</skos:altLabel >

literal

0....n

skos:note

Information relating to the timespan or period.
<skos:note>The Roman Empire (Latin: Imperium Romanum) was the post-­Republican period of the ancient Roman civilization, characterised by an autocratic form of government and large territorial holdings around the Mediterranean in Europe, Africa, and Asia.</skos:note>

literal

0....n

dcterms:hasPart

Reference to a timespan which is part of the described timespan.

ref

0....n

dcterms:isPartOf

Reference to a timespan of which the described timespan is a part.

ref

0....n

edm:begin

The date the timespan started. Europeana recommends date conforming to Extended Date/Time Format (EDTF) and ISO 8601 starting with the year and with hyphens (YYYY-­MM-DD). Providing edm:begin in combination with edm:end is recommended for this class.
Example 1: <edm:begin>-0026</edm:begin>

Example:2: <edm:begin>27 BC</edm:begin>

Note: '27 BC', while allowed, does not follow the above recommendation.

For recommendations on medata quality see https://europeana.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EF/pages/1969979393 , more specifically Metadata Tier B and https://europeana.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EF/pages/1967849520

literal

0....1

edm:end

The date the timespan finished. Europeana recommends date conforming to Extended Date/Time Format (EDTF) and ISO 8601 starting with the year and with hyphens (YYYY‐MM-DD). Providing edm:end in combination with edm:begin is recommended for this class.

<edm:end>1770</edm:end>

For recommendations on medata quality see https://europeana.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EF/pages/1969979393 , more specifically Metadata Tier B and https://europeana.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EF/pages/1967849520

literal

0....1

edm:isNextInSequence

Can be used to represent a sequence of Time periods. Use this for objects that are part of a hierarchy or sequence to ensure correct display in the portal.
<edm:isNextInSequence rdf:resource="http://semium.org/time/roman_republic"/> (The Roman Empire was preceded by the Roman Republic)

ref

0....n

skos:notation

The notation used to represent the timespan. This may or may not be words in natural language, e.g.
<skos:notation rdf:datatype=http://id.loc.gov/datatypes/edtf/EDTF-level1">../-5300</skos:notation>

string (+rdf:datatype
attribute)

0…1

owl:sameAs

The URI of a timespan
<owl:sameAs rdf:resource="http://semium.org/time/roman_empire"/>

ref

0....n