I’ve got examples from my domain of work and what I’m grappling with for PKM. However, I do admit my examples likely do not align with the “ideal” fibery users who are in the technology/content creation arena. I discussed a few examples of fuzzy dates in an earlier post on Anytype:
I think almost all systems out there try to define dates in very specific and rigid terms which makes representing fuzzy dates like “August 1962”, “Autumn 1720”, “1955 - 1957”, “1920’s”, “17th century”, etc. impossible.
In that post, I also talked about using conventions and what I’ve found to be the pitfalls:
You end up either having to use text/string fields where you lose all sense (and control) of the fact this is actually temporal data or have adopt a set of standards/conventions to work within the constraints of how the system represents dates/time. For example, you can adopt a convention that all month-type dates like “August 1962” would be represented as the first day of the month “1962-08-01” or a range between first and last day of that month. But I feel that takes away from what we intuitively know is a less precise definition than the actual range between first and last day of that particular month. It also calls into questions the accuracy of any date captured as August 1, 1962 (i.e. is this actually August 1 or is the date just following the appx. month convention).
I shared one approach that I’ve seen. Just cross-posting that in case it is helpful:
Arches (a GIS based data system for historic sites management) uses EDTF to address this which seems like an interesting solution.
From a broader perspective, I think dealing with fuzzy / uncertain data is an important challenge for all data tools (especially when you talk about “knowledge”). However, I’m not expecting fibery to lead this or come up with a solution because it is likely not at all important to your customers (although once you start thinking about uncertainty in databases, you see it everywhere in all systems of record). But I try and keep raising it anytime there is a discussion about fundamental data types in the hope that eventually a conventional tool starts to tackle this challenge.
I’ll step down from my soapbox