Date modified
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Meaning and purpose
Date modified is an indication of the currency of the information in a metadata record. It records the date metadata describing an activity, collection, party or service was last changed in the source system. Only one Date modified value can be present in a metadata record at a time.
When a change occurs in the source metadata store or repository, the date of the change can be provided to the ANDS Collections Registry as part of a RIF-CS document. This information answers the question: When was this metadata record last modified in its source repository?
Use in Research Data Australia
Dates are not displayed or searchable.
RIF-CS best practice guidelines
This date does not refer to the date of change in the ANDS Collections Registry itself and is not derived from other data. It has no relation to the data of the last harvest of metadata from a data source.
Date modified can be used with activity, collection, party or service registry objects.
The presence of Date modified information means only that the metadata has changed. This might, for example, have been a change in custodian. If a dataset is continually added to, but the metadata describing it doesn't change, there is no need to record a Date modified. On the other hand, if the underlying dataset changes its scope or nature, the metadata record describing it should change as well, and a Date modified element could be supplied to ANDS.
None of these scenarios affect the identification of the object or entity using a persistent identifier. Changes to the metadata record do not affect identity.
Dates are described in UTC and of one of the forms described in section 3.2.7 of the W3C's Schema Data Types document . See also background information about dates and times.
Modification dates will usually be system-generated by the source system.
Dates are stored with time zone information. When a time zone is added to a UTC dateTime, the result is the date and time 'in that time zone'. For example, 2002-10-10T12:00:00+05:00 is described as 2002-10-10T07:00:00Z and 2002-10-10T00:00:00+05:00 is described as 2002-10-09T19:00:00Z.
RIF-CS examples
<collection type="dataset" dateModified="2009-12-15T01:42:04Z"></collection>
| Date | Change history |
| April 2010 | Consultation draft |
| 26 October 2010 | First web publication |
| 15 April 2011 | Corrected to state that dateModified is not searchable |
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