Time database
Desired features:
Time keeping database (tkdb) | IANA time zone database (tzdb) |
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Exactly one term for one kind of object | Uses terms interchangeably (region, zone), and uses ambiguous terms (zone for IANA zones and real world zones) |
Provisional name for smallest geographic unit: "sector" | Smallest geographic unit is named "zone" |
The sectors cover the whole surface of the earth | Some areas are not covered, e.g. the ISO 3166 country "Bouvet Island" |
New sectors are created only by splitting and deprecating old sectors, so a user can know if an ID needs a check for correctness. |
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Relations between deprecated sectors and the sectors that have been created out of them are published. | No split history is explicitly published. |
Record all legal time |
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Provide time zone acronyms that are unique within each country and at any given point in time refer to only one offset from a base time | Uses EST and CST for time stamps of zones in Australia that use DST and those that do not. That means for a given point in time during summer the offset from UTC and therefore UTC itself cannot be derived from the local time representation. |
ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes for countries | ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes for countries. Some of the codes have been re-assigned, e.g. CS can refer to Czechoslovakia or Serbia and Montenegro. |