Informationdates

Informationdates is a term used in information science to describe the set of date-related attributes attached to information items. These dates document when an item was created, last modified, published, accessed, archived, or expired, and can also record its provenance and version history. The concept treats temporal context as an integral part of an item's metadata.

The primary purpose of informationdates is to support governance, authenticity, and usability. Temporal metadata enables accurate search and filtering by time, facilitates auditing and regulatory compliance, and supports reproducibility in research by tracing the historical state of data and documents.

Common components include created, modified, accessed, published, archived, and expiration dates; versioning timestamps; provenance events with timestamps; and time zone information. Some systems also store approximate dates or date ranges when historical information is uncertain, as well as durations or intervals for events.

Informationdates intersects with metadata standards and provenance models. It relates to Dublin Core and schema.org date properties, as well as the W3C PROV model for provenance. However, informationdates is a descriptive term rather than a formal standalone standard, used to discuss how dates are managed across platforms and domains.

Applications of informationdates span digital libraries, content management systems, research data repositories, legal and regulatory archives, and digital forensics. In these contexts, temporal metadata supports tracking, auditing, and validating the lifecycle of information assets.

Challenges include maintaining consistent time zones, handling incomplete or uncertain dates, integrating legacy data, balancing privacy with transparency, and the overhead of storing and synchronizing temporal metadata across diverse systems. Related topics include metadata, provenance, version control, temporal databases, and data governance.