WG Review: Serialising Extended Data About Times and Events (sedate)

A new IETF WG has been proposed in the Applications and Real-Time Area. The
IESG has not made any determination yet. The following draft charter was
submitted, and is provided for informational purposes only. Please send your
comments to the IESG mailing list (iesg@ietf.org) by 2021-06-11.

Serialising Extended Data About Times and Events (sedate)
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Current status: Proposed WG

Chairs:
  TBD

Assigned Area Director:
  Francesca Palombini <francesca.palombini@ericsson.com>

Applications and Real-Time Area Directors:
  Murray Kucherawy <superuser@gmail.com>
  Francesca Palombini <francesca.palombini@ericsson.com>

Mailing list:
  Address: sedate@ietf.org
  To subscribe: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/sedate
  Archive: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/sedate/

Group page: https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/sedate/

Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-sedate/

RFC3339 defines a format that can reliably express an instant in time, either
in UTC or in a local time along with the offset against UTC. However,
datetime data often has additional context, such as the timezone or calendar
system that was in use when that instant was recorded. Particularly when
using times for interval, recurrence, or offset calculations, it is necessary
to know the context in which the timepoint exists.

It is valuable to have a serialisation format that retains this context and
can reliably round-trip the additional context to systems that understand it,
via intermediate systems that only need to know about the instant in time.

The TC39 working group at ECMA have developed a format that is a good basis
for this work: draft-ryzokuken-datetime-extended.

It is anticipated that this document would be a companion to RFC3339 rather
than a replacement, embedding an unaltered RFC3339 instant along with the
contextual data.

It is also within scope for this working group to consider a minor update to
RFC3339 to allow larger than four-digit signed years, to enable representing
times further into the past and future.

It is anticipated that this working group will publish one or two documents
on the work mentioned above. After that, the working group will close down or
recharter.

The working group will coordinate with ECMA International TC39 and ISO TC154.

Milestones:

  Dec 2021 - Submit extended date and time draft to the IESG for publication