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Can ISO 8601 represent a date such as "Summer 2011"?

The closest I can think of is "2011-07" or fallback to "2011". Of course if you are allowed to make use of time intervals you could use "2011-06-01/2011-08-31", but I am interested in possibilities that can be used in Wikidata and I don't thing the time interval solution can be used there.

Finn Årup Nielsen
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    You would need something like the [Extended Date Time Format](http://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/pre-submission.html#season). – jonrsharpe Feb 26 '17 at 12:51
  • I didn't know the season feature. (I tried the feature on Wikidata but it would unfortunately not accept it) – Finn Årup Nielsen Feb 26 '17 at 12:59
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    EDTF is not ISO 8601 and EDTF can be applied with different freature levels – Jakob May 18 '17 at 11:13
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    Time intervals are used in Wikidata, as well as time precision: see e. g. https://stackoverflow.com/q/46196832/7879193 – Stanislav Kralin Oct 10 '17 at 16:37
  • @Stanislav-Kralin Though Wikidata can represent time precision, I do not see how it can represent "Summer 2011" as the nearest precision levels are "month" and "year". – Finn Årup Nielsen Oct 11 '17 at 17:08
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    @FinnÅrupNielsen, I do not know your use cases, but take a look at [Isaac Azimov](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q34981) date of birth. – Stanislav Kralin Oct 11 '17 at 19:41

1 Answers1

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ISO 8601-2:2019: Extensions defines sub-year groups exactly as you are asking for.

These are defined in § 4.8 Sub-year Groupings. The sub-year groupings are an extension of the year-month format. (e.g. YYYY-XX) where XX = 01 - 12 to represent January - December.

XX = 21, 22, 23, 24 are used to represent Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter respectively.

Although, you mentioned June to August in your question so you might be referring specifically to the northern hemisphere Summer. The northern hemisphere specific seasons are 25, 26, 27, 28 respectively.

For completeness 29, 30, 31, 32 refer to the seasons in the southern hemisphere (Spring - Winter again).

It's also possible to refer to the four quarters (33, 34, 35, 36); three thirds (37, 38, 39); and two halves (40, 41) of the year.

So to answer your question. "Summer 2011 (Northern Hemisphere)" would be represented as:

2011-26
ijmacd
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