Consider aligning dates to be inclusive or exclusive
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Mustafa YilmazJuly 31, 2024 at 5:37 PMEdited
The feedback we have pursued from the Ed-Fi community members have revealed that their usage of EndDate data elements aligns with our conclusion in the ticket that is these EndDate data elements need to be and are used inclusively. One specific use case our community members shared with us was about a student who was enrolled only for a single day. In this case the StartDate and EndDate are both the same date as they are both inclusive.
With the affirmation of the usage cases (at least for those shared with the DS team) in the field with the conclusion here in the ticket, we concluded the work for this ticket with no further action needed.
Christopher WatkinsJuly 24, 2024 at 8:51 PM
Thank you and for having the discussion around this item! To summarize we determined that event dates, those being dates that indicate the occurrence of an event (vs a duration), are inherently inclusive. Ex: SessionEndDate is the Year/month/day that is the end of the session, and is understood to be the entire day's relevant activities.
The next steps will be to seek feedback from the SIS vendors to find out if their approach aligns with our concept. Passing to Mustafa.
Mustafa YilmazJuly 3, 2024 at 7:58 PMEdited
I was not able to track any survey results on this issue, but I would like to bring this to our current sprint to reassess the issue and make a decision for any need for definition or model updates. I have attached list of items in the
Excel sheet to help with the reassessment.
Eric JanssonSeptember 17, 2021 at 2:46 PM
Add to a survey of SIS systems on comon practices and if their systems describe these semantics or if they vary. For example:
Does your system describe a student withdrawal date, a teacher assignment date, etc. as inclusive of exclusive of the date that appears in your system?
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There is often some ambiguity as to if a date is inclusive of all times on that date, or exclusive of all times and it has been suggested that Ed-Fi adopt a standard practice.
For example, is StudentSchoolAssociation.ExitWithdrawDate inclusive or exclusive? If that date is 09/15/21, does that mean the student was still enrolled on 9/15/21? Or was 9/15/21 the first day they were not enrolled?
Or is that date simply the date portion of the exact time the action occurred (e.g. the the student was de-enrolled on 9/15/21 at 3:00 pm, so we drop the time portion).
One of the the difficulties of solving this problem is that the semantics of inclusivity/exclusivity may be local. Imagine this scenario: Ed-Fi defines StudentSchoolAssociation.ExitWithdrawDate as "the first whole day as of which the student is no longer enrolled in the school" - in this case, the date of 9/15/21 may need to be incremented by a provider system to 9/16/22 to meet Ed-Fi's semantics. That seems simple, but is likely to confuse system users - why did 9/15 become 9/16?
The current Ed-Fi semantics seem to be: the date element on which the action occurred - note the current definition of ExitWithdrawDate as "The recorded exit or withdraw date for the student."
If analytics need to be more precise, one possibility is to add time elements to such entities to allow for local values to be clarified. However, this too adds potential for more confusion.