truncated dates are iso 8601 compliant
I have looked into the truncated date issue. From wikipedia on iso 8601 you find:
"The standard also allows for calendar dates to be written with reduced precision. For example, one may write "1981-04" to mean "1981 April", and one may simply write "1981" to refer to that year or "19" to refer to that century."
So if we use the date "1981", we will be compliant to iso 8601 ( latest version : iso 8601:2004). The only issue raised was that the software developer must decide on a way to compare dates of different precision , i.e. is 1981 before or after 1981-02. I did not look into this very deeply but I could find no standard for this. I won't spend any time on this comparison issue right now.
Here are a couple of other URLs FAQ on ISO 8601 Info on allowed values for MODS attributes (including datetime) Date time format examples
"The standard also allows for calendar dates to be written with reduced precision. For example, one may write "1981-04" to mean "1981 April", and one may simply write "1981" to refer to that year or "19" to refer to that century."
So if we use the date "1981", we will be compliant to iso 8601 ( latest version : iso 8601:2004). The only issue raised was that the software developer must decide on a way to compare dates of different precision , i.e. is 1981 before or after 1981-02. I did not look into this very deeply but I could find no standard for this. I won't spend any time on this comparison issue right now.
Here are a couple of other URLs FAQ on ISO 8601 Info on allowed values for MODS attributes (including datetime) Date time format examples