• Sort revisions chronologically.
• Determine the freshness or staleness of content.
• Assess whether information may require verification.
• Correlate changes with provenance, reviewer activity, and version updates.

Temporal metadata is critical for maintaining trust and interpretability, especially in dynamic or frequently updated resources.

• Represent the actual time the revision was completed.
• Use an ISO 8601–compliant format, with timezone information strongly recommended.
• Be immutable — once recorded, the timestamp SHOULD NOT be altered.

MSP-1 does not prescribe whether the timestamp must be local time or UTC, but UTC is strongly preferred for consistency.

• Be a valid ISO 8601 timestamp string.

Recommended attributes include:

• timezone — implied by ISO 8601 but may be clarified.
• precision — optional note about timestamp precision (e.g., seconds, milliseconds).
• source — human or system responsible for recording the date.

• AI agents MUST treat revisionDate as the authoritative timestamp for the associated revision.
• AI SHOULD compare revisionDate timestamps to determine update order.
• More recent revisionDates SHOULD increase trust in data freshness.
• Stale revisionDates MAY decrease trust depending on the domain (e.g., medical information vs. history).
• Missing revisionDates SHOULD be treated as weakened temporal confidence.
• Conflicting revisionDates MUST be treated as structural errors.

Properly formatted and truthful timestamps improve the reliability of AI-generated answers by grounding them in a clear temporal context.

• revision — revisionDate is a subcomponent of revision metadata.
• revisionNotes — explains the change associated with the timestamp.
• revisionVersion — ties a timestamp to a semantic version.
• provenance — timestamps help track lineage evolution.
• trust — recent dates increase credibility for time-sensitive domains.

{
  "revisionDate": "2025-12-11T14:32:00Z"
}

Example with optional detail:

{
  "revisionDate": "2025-06-03T09:18:45-05:00",
  "precision": "seconds"
}

Example within a full revision object:

{
  "revision": {
    "id": "rev-2025-03",
    "revisionDate": "2025-12-10T12:03:00Z",
    "revisionNotes": "Corrected terminology and added citation.",
    "revisionVersion": "1.0.3"
  }
}

• It uses a valid ISO 8601 timestamp.
• It records the true time of the revision event.
• The timestamp is stable and non-conflicting.
• All normative rules for revision timestamp semantics are followed.