Some Crunchbase's Dates are somewhat more complex than a typical Date object; thus, we not only have a "Date" field type, but also a "Date Precision" field type to handle these more complex scenarios where Crunchbase allows users to enter only part of a date. (for more details on available field types, please refer to this page)
Here are two examples that "Date Precision" field type will be used:
- when a user/staff creates or edits an Organization, (s)he can set the "founded date" to a year, omitting the month and day.
- a user can enter the date the "founded date" for a company as simply "2011", omitting both month and day. Whereas this is valid input, the resulting date stored in the Crunchbase graph (and returned from the API) is "2011-01-01". Without more information, a developer cannot know that the month and day were not provided.
As a result of these complex scenarios, we also store the fact that the user only entered the year by annotating the date with what we call a "Precision" value. The precision value of a date tells API users which parts of the date value do we have information for (e.g., which parts of the date were provided by a contributor or data partner and which parts were omitted).
Using the table below, the precision value for the "founded date" example would be "year", meaning that only the year (2011) was entered.
| Precision Value | Meaning |
|---|---|
| day | year, month, and day are provided |
| month | year and month are provided; day is omitted |
| year | only year is provided; month and day are omitted |
| none | the event occurred, but year, month, and day are all unknown/omitted. (ex: a company is closed, but year/month/day of closing is unknown) |