Date Normalization Utility

This Java utility takes non-machine readable Common Era dates as input and outputs machine-readable dates in order to enhance digital collections to support date range queries. The output is compliant with the TEMPER (Temporal Enumerated Ranges) specification.

Note that this code is unsupported by CDL; use at your own risk.

Description

datenorm.jar contains all of the necessary Java source and JAR files to produce a working date normalizer.

The date normalization was developed to create a standardized Common Era (CE) date range in the form year1,year2,year3-year4,year5-year6,

year1 and year2 are individual years while year3-year4 and year5-year6 are year ranges.

Input	Outputs
[1880's]	date.normalize: 1880-1889 date.temper: 1880-1889 date.decade: 1880 date.token: 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889

For a detailed description of the algorithm, inputs and outputs, consult the August 2005 draft of the specification. [DOC]

Requirements

datenorm.jar requires Java 1.4 and Apache Ant in order to run.

Installation

1. Create a directory.
2. Download datenorm.jar to the new directory.
3. Unpack the JAR by issuing the command: jar -xvf datenorm.jar

Running the Utility

Within the newly expanded ant directory, execute the following command: ant run-date

As packaged, resources/FrameworkLocal.properties is set to accept data/example-date.txt (a file that only has dates) as input. Changing DateTest.type=date to DateTest.type=text will tell the Ant script to expect input at data/example-text.txt (a file of text with dates inside).

Output is directed to SYSOUT.