OpenAtlas

Things to consider:

1) We will use it a lot. Data will be fuzzy most of the time.
2) I would like to use timestamps, but we would have to use valid full dates (day/month/year)

I like your idea to offer one date field for e.g. begin, which can be expanded to two date fields to define a period.

Because of 2) both fields have to be full dates. e.g.

If it was known that a person was born in 1473 the first field would be 1.1.1473 and the second 31.12.1473
If it is known that a person was born in the late 15 century it would be something like 1.1.1490 and 31.12.1499

That way we could use timestamps continuously which make querys much more performant or even possible.

I didn't looked into how to implement this with the CRM. Challenges there would be:

1) How to distinguish if it was an exact date or a period - if the only difference is that there are two links instead of one the querys would get very messy
2) With actors: distinguish between birth and first appearance - in the UI its only a checkbox but in the CRM they should have different links
3) Design it in a way that it is still understandable for "outsiders" and compatible with similar projects or data sets