Yearbased

Yearbased is a term used to describe data organization and retrieval methods that group content primarily by calendar year or fiscal year. It is used in information management, digital archives, and content platforms to provide a time-centric view of materials.

Origin and usage: The term is not a formal standard; it emerges in discussions of archival practice and database design as a descriptive label for year-oriented indexing and navigation. In practice, yearbased schemes may be implemented as a dedicated year field in metadata, or as hierarchical folders or catalogs arranged by year.

Applications: In digital libraries, news aggregators, and media archives, yearbased structures support time-based browsing, trend analysis, and filtering by year. Researchers may rely on year-based collections to locate items from a specific time period.

Advantages and limitations: A yearbased approach provides clear temporal context and can improve retrieval speed for year-specific queries. It may, however, obscure other dimensions such as topic or provenance, and can complicate handling of items spanning multiple years, different calendar systems, or incomplete date information.

Variants: Common implementations include year-based indexing, year-based catalogs, and year-based access controls. Some systems combine yearbased organization with other axes such as topic, location, or author to enable multi-dimensional navigation.

Examples: A news archive that presents articles by year and month is adopting a yearbased retrieval strategy. Academic repositories may offer yearbased datasets keyed by publication year.

See also: Chronological sorting, temporal databases, archival science, metadata standards such as Dublin Core.