Excellent question. ISO 8601 has features to encode time intervals ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Time_intervals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_860

Excellent question. ISO 8601 has features to encode time intervals ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Time_intervals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Time_intervals ). If that's too verbose, and we only need to represent integer intervals, one could store a truncated representation, where the omitted parts mean "any" (like * in cron). For example, `2016-11` could mean the entire month of November. But those are just ideas for the representation. The important feature is that not all objects are precise points in time, but may be a block/interval/range.