Profile advisor
Paste a column of dates from a collection and the advisor says which conventions the data uses, before anything is parsed. Each string is still parsed on its own; the advisor only recommends the profile to parse it under, and writes that profile out for you to review and save. Nothing you paste is stored.
Or try a corpus sample: yearrange (museum catalogues) timetwister (US archives) Getty ULAN (artist dates) EDTF specification examples PMC (Paul Mellon Centre) outputs
timetwister (US archives) 91 analysed · via the service
Recommendations
- 11 strings name a season: decide hemisphere and whether 'Winter 1776' is Dec-Feb or Jan-Mar (winter policy; profiles/archive-us.json).
Suggested profile
Nothing in the data called for a change from the default profile.
{
"inherits": "default",
"name": "suggested",
"description": "Suggested by the profile advisor from 91 strings: nothing differed from the default. Review before use."
}Vocabulary
| Kind | Word or notation | Strings | For example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Band words | mid | 2 | mid 1770's ca. mid 19th century |
| Band words | early | 1 | early 1770's |
| Band words | late | 1 | late 1770's |
| Hedges | ca | 2 | ca. 1776 ca. mid 19th century |
| Hedges | approximately | 1 | Approximately July 4, 1776 |
| Century notations | word | 2 | ca. mid 19th century 17th century |
| Other languages | es | 1 | agosto 4 1776 |
| Other languages | fr | 1 | août 4 1776 |
| Other languages | it | 1 | agosto 4 1776 |
Shapes
| Shape | Strings | For example | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Numeric dates | 6 | 1776-07-04/1789-03-01 1789-03-01/1776-07-04 7/4/1776 | Day, month and year as numbers. |
| Day-first evidence | 0 | A first number over 12, so it can only be a day. | |
| Month-first evidence | 0 | A second number over 12, so the first is the month. | |
| Two-digit years | 0 | Need a window to become four-digit years. | |
| Bracketed | 2 | [1776] [July 4, 1776] | Inferred dates in MARC style. |
| Seasons | 11 | Winter 1776 win. 1776 1776 Spring | Need a hemisphere and a winter policy. |
| Undated | 0 | The text says there is no date. | |
| Open ends | 2 | 1776 - 17-- | Before, after, present, a trailing dash. |
| Decades | 7 | 1770's - 1780s 1770's - 1787 1776 - 1780's | 1950s and the like; band words apply to them too. |
| Period words | 0 | Dynasties, reigns and named periods need period tables. |
The same advice from code
The advisor is a library call and an endpoint on the dates API; the response carries these counts, the examples, the recommendations, the suggested profile and a Markdown rendering.
POST https://dates.linkedart.net/v1/advise
Content-Type: text/plain
early 19th century
ca. 1850
7/4/1776var report = ProfileAdvisor.Analyse(File.ReadLines("dates.txt"));
Console.WriteLine(report.ToMarkdown());
File.WriteAllText("profiles/mine.json", report.SuggestedProfileJson("mine").ToJsonString(ParseProfile.JsonOptions));Or from the repository: dotnet run --project tools/Corpus -- advise dates.txt.