Re: REPOSTING - Finance Sub-group comments

["William J. Kammerer" <wkammerer@foresightcorp.com>]

Re: the ebXML CC Finance Sub-group's comments on the Aggregate Analysis
document provided by Marianne Cockle, see Line No. 326: Duration
Aggregate.

Durations are already built into the W3C Schema specification:
timeDuration represents a duration of time, like the [ISO 8601] extended
format PnYn MnDTnHnMnS.   Like everything I pretend to know about
schemas, I found this out from Martin Bryan's "Datatyping for Electronic
Data interchange - Draft CEN/ISSS Workshop Agreement," at
http://www.cenorm.be/isss/Workshop/ec/Datatyping/data99_000.htm.  Martin
goes on to say:

   Time durations are periods expressed in terms of years, months,
   days, hours, minutes and/or seconds according to the Gregorian
   calendar. These are expressed as an integer (or decimal number)
   followed by a letter. The letter P is used to identify the
   start of the period definition, the letter T being used to
   identify the start of the time components within the period.
   The basic format of a timeDuration definition is PnYnMnDTnHnMnS,
   where n is the appropriate integer/decimal. Values can be
   truncated by omitting one or more of the lower order numbers and
   the associated qualifying letter. If the number of years,
   months, days, hours, minutes, or seconds in any expression equals
   zero, the number and its corresponding designator may be omitted.
   The whole of the date can also be omitted by following the P with
   a T.

This is different from the timePeriod type, which I think must be an ISO
8601 Extended format period of time identified by its start and end
dates, e.g., l985-04-12T23:20:50/1985-06-25T10:30:00.

William J. Kammerer
FORESIGHT Corp.
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+1 614 791-1600

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