Tidsrepresentation

Tidsrepresentation, or time representation, is the way temporal information—dates, times, durations, and temporal relations—is encoded, modeled, and interpreted across systems and theories. It covers how time is defined, measured, stored, and queried, as well as how temporal concepts are expressed in language and thought.

In philosophy, tidsrepresentation concerns the ontology and phenomenology of time, including debates between presentism, eternalism, and other theories about the nature of past, present, and future. In computer science and information systems, it focuses on concrete formats and data types for temporal data, such as timestamps, calendar dates, time zones, and durations, and on methods for aggregating, querying, and comparing temporal information. In linguistics and formal semantics, it deals with how tense, aspect, and temporal adverbs are represented and interpreted. In physics, time representation relates to how time is modeled within theories like relativity, distinguishing between coordinate time and proper time and accounting for phenomena such as time dilation.

Common practical representations include ISO 8601 date-time strings, Unix time (seconds since a reference epoch), and various time zone databases used to convert between local and universal time. Temporal data types in programming languages (for example, DateTime, Instant, and Duration) support operations like addition, subtraction, and comparison, while libraries address locale, calendar systems, and leap seconds.

Key challenges include clock synchronization, time zone rules, daylight saving adjustments, leap seconds, and calendar reforms. Effective tidsrepresentation enables accurate timestamping, robust temporal queries, and coherent cross-system time coordination.

See also: ISO 8601, Unix time, temporal databases, temporal logic, time zones.