agessince

Agessince is a metric used to represent the elapsed time from a specified event to the present, typically expressed in years, days, or other time units. It is computed as agessince = current_time - event_time. Unlike age, which measures the duration of a subject's life, agessince focuses on the duration since a defined event.

The term is a portmanteau of age and since and is used primarily in data analysis, software monitoring, and research contexts where tracking time since a triggering event is useful. It is not standardized and may be used differently across systems.

Applications include software development (time since deployment or last commit), epidemiology (time since exposure or onset), finance (time since a market event), and project management (time since task creation or flag). These use cases illustrate the versatility but also the risk of ambiguity without clear units.

Implementation typically stores agessince as a numeric value with an accompanying unit—years, days, or hours—derived from standard timestamps. Presentations for users should convert to human-friendly forms. Computations should account for calendar irregularities, time zones, and leap years.

Because agessince is not widely standardized, its meaning can vary by context. It is generally advisable to pair agessince with explicit event identifiers, units, and reference time scaling. In data schemas, prefer precise fields such as time_since_event and unit, or store the underlying timestamps and compute agessince on demand.