Frequently Asked Questions

This part of the documentation answers common questions about the Open Raadsinformatie API.

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