yearwhere

Yearwhere is a term used in data science, digital humanities, and information organization to describe a framework or approach for locating information within a specific year or set of years. In this approach, the year serves as the primary coordinate for indexing, retrieving, and visualizing records, events, or phenomena, with secondary attributes such as location, category, or source providing contextual filters.

Origin and usage: Yearwhere is a neologism formed from "year" and "where" to convey "where in time." The term has appeared in scholarly discussions and in some data-management tools that emphasize calendar-year anchoring rather than just chronological order. Its usage is not standardized across disciplines, and interpretations may vary between strict indexing schemes and more flexible user-interface concepts.

Applications: In bibliographic and archival databases, yearwhere enables disambiguation of similarly named events by assigning a year tag. In time-series analysis and event databases, it supports queries like "events in 1969" or "economic shocks by year." In visualization, it underpins timelines, year-aggregated maps, and year-based dashboards. The approach often functions alongside other dimensions such as location or category to support multifactor querying and analysis.

Limitations and variations: Definitions and implementations of yearwhere vary by domain. Some treat it as a formal indexing scheme with precise year-level granularity, while others view it as a conceptual principle for user interfaces that emphasize year-level context over exact timestamps.

Relation to related concepts: Related ideas include temporal data models, timestamps, year-based ontologies, and event-centric databases.