Unit Intervals

[Philippe Verdy]

"periodicity" matches your description with multiples of time units; for
submultiples the term is "frequency", the reverse.

There are SI-derived units for them, but only for non-calendric units
- seconds, minutes, hours are OK, days and weeks may be OK if we ignore UTC
adjustments, months and years are definitely not OK, unless we just set an
average but the intended usage is generally aligned with a calendar
(generally the Gregorian one. However you don't just want to expres the
duration of the period, but also the fact that this is a period ("every...")
- for submultiples, the concept of frequency also has derived SI units
(hertz, rpm...) but here aso it is more complicate for expressions like
"twice a year" as the base unit of time (year) is not fixed unless you take
an average year length.

There are expressions combinining time units and prefixes as adverbs or
adjectives (e.g. "biweekly", "quarterly").These are common contractions;
but generally an interface will be built using some generic static text
with selectors for the base time unit, a counter, and possible selectors
for days of week or days of months (this lat option implying fixing a
relative start date) when the base unit of time is calendar-based (week,
month, year) and also separate settings for scheduling time of day where
activity of the repeated event can be allowed or restarted in case of
failure to start in time or in case of other conditions (computer or
network load, synchronization with an external event, power conditions;
state of some devices such as screen on/off, case closure; battery level;
monitored temperature sensors and fan controls; some maximum file size, or
free space on disk...). All these are specific to the kind of schedular you
have. For managing personal or business calendars, other conditions could
include availability of some contacts; completion states or dealys of some
other works, pricings; location of user, security levels...
Things will be differently expressed if you speak about publications and
productions, or make an application for logistic and transportation
purposes. And it's difficult to map all distinct concepts across
cultures/countries/languages/juridictions.

2014-12-11 20:21 GMT+01:00 Cameron Dutro <cameron at lumoslabs.com>:

> Hey Philippe,
>
> Yes, you're absolutely right, periodicity is a much better description of
> what I'm after. How would looking at the interfaces for personal calendars
> or help pages for schedulers like cron be helpful? I'm looking for
> translations for said units - I'm not interested in actually scheduling
> events.
>
> -Cameron
>
> On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 2:43 AM, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p at wanadoo.fr>
> wrote:
>
>> The term "interval" is badly chosen in what he describes; Cameron
>> actually wants to express periodicity (without any implied start or end;
>> i.e. only the frequency).
>> However his description is limited to multiples of a base time unit; but
>> he forgets submultiples :
>> e.g. "twice a week" vs. "every two weeks"
>> The intended usage could include displying an interface for controling a
>> task scheduler (such as the shell command "at"); or adding a repeated event
>> in a personal calendar.
>> I suggest he looks into exisitng interface for personal calendars (in
>> smartphones for example) or help pages for programmed schedulers ("at",
>> "cron", Task Manager in Windows; etc.).
>>
>>
>> 2014-12-10 7:43 GMT+01:00 Yury Tarasievich <yury.tarasievich at gmail.com>:
>>
>>> Dealing with similar problem right now, I'd note that "interval" would
>>> primarily mean a pair "startvalue, endvalue" with some formatting to it.
>>> That formatting isn't even "widely" cultural tradition, but "narrow"
>>> typographic convention, with possibly quite extensive definition, subject
>>> to change. E.g., for numbers intervals in Russian language typography,
>>> there are "..." and "--" (U+2013) and "---" (U+2014); of course, the "-"
>>> (dash) is commonly used; formerly, the U+00F7 was prescribed; in maths
>>> related text you'd meet ":" and ", ... ,;"; in bastardised "computer
>>> spelling" -- ".." (two dots). And it is context related, too (U+2013 for
>>> dates, U+2014 or ellipsis for numbers).
>>>
>>> How to formalise all this into CLDR? Or I may have misunderstood you
>>> completely :)
>>>
>>> Yury
>>>
>>> On 12/10/2014 01:56 AM, Cameron Dutro wrote:
>>>
>>>> I took a look through CLDR data this afternoon
>>>> looking for a way to consistently format what I
>>>> call "unit intervals" in multiple languages. It
>>>>
>>> ...
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>>> CLDR-Users at unicode.org
>>> http://unicode.org/mailman/listinfo/cldr-users
>>>
>>
>>
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>>
>
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