Weeks and days-of-week
We are pretty excited to announce a new feature we developed in our application – support for weeks and day-of-week. Using this feature, a user can span the weeks of a year, compare weeks, spot trends in different week days and more. In this post I’ll detail some of the technicalities of those features.
There are a number of ways to define week numbering schemes in a year. Simplistic methods can set week #1 to be the week in which January 1st occurs. However, this can be misleading as a week can potentially be of 1 or 2 days only. The most useful way to describe a week is using the ISO week standard. There are several ways to define an ISO week, but maybe the most intuitive version is “the first week in a year with at least 4 days in it”.
This means, that according to ISO week, if January 1st is Tuesday, then this week, including Monday (which was still in previous year), are all considered week #1 of this year. Week numbers range from 1 to 52 or 53. This standard is very common in enterprises world-wide.
Of course, there’s still something missing, and that’s the definition of the week – whether it’s Monday – Sunday (typical Western week) or Sunday – Saturday. This setting affects both the order of days within the week and the definition of the week numbers.
Weeks and day-of-week can prove very important to analysis of trends and for finding hidden information in data. The inclusion of weeks and day-of-week in InsFocus BI greatly enhances its ability to provide insightful data to insurance executives.
Hanan Taiber
CTO, InsFocus Systems
hanan_taiber@insfocus.com