.. _faq: Frequently Asked Questions ========================== This part of the documentation answers common questions about the Open Raadsinformatie API. .. _date_granularity: What does ``date_granularity`` mean? ------------------------------------ Dates are fickle things. A date is a particular point in time, and can be represented in `very many ways `_. In addition, dates have gradations in precision. For example, ``Jan. 1970`` is not as precise as ``1 January 1970 00:00:00`` is. The different data sources in the Open Raadsinformatie API expose dates with very different precisions (``Vr 20 mei 2015 18:00``, ``1 January 2010``, etc.), often because that is as precise as the collection owner *knows*. In order to be able to reason about these dates, we opted to generate a full-fledged date anyway (so ``Jan. 2010`` becomes ``2010-01-01:00:00:00``), and store its ``granularity`` alongside it. The granularity signifies how **precise** the date is known; it is an integer, which indicates *how many digits* of the (IS-formatted) date were known. +----------------+----------------+---------------------------------------------------------+ | Example date | Granularity | Description | +================+================+=========================================================+ | 21th century | 2 | ``21th century`` means ``between 2000 and 2100`` | +----------------+----------------+---------------------------------------------------------+ | 2010 | 4 | We know the year exactly, so we know the first 4 digits | +----------------+----------------+---------------------------------------------------------+ | January 2010 | 6 | Month and year | +----------------+----------------+---------------------------------------------------------+ | 1 January 2010 | 8 | Day, month and year | +----------------+----------------+---------------------------------------------------------+