What?

A feature to update values in a date column using lower and upper bounds based on values from other date columns or fixed values.

Why?

#1304 will add support for ISO 8601 date intervals when reading dates in other Augur commands. This opens the door for augur curate to generate precise date intervals as output, presenting immediate use cases for #1304.

Take the example of a sequence with collection_date='2025' and release_date='2025-01-23'. It makes sense to impose release_date as an upper bound on collection_date, so the collection_date can be made more precise as 2025-01-01/2025-01-23. The lower part can be similarly bounded by another column such as clade root date.

Where?

The initial proposal was to add the feature to augur curate format-dates. This was prototyped in #1773, with the end result being a decision to create a new command for this feature.

@genehack proposed the name augur curate apply-date-bounds, which I think is good. I also considered these: apply-date-limits, bound-dates, limit-dates. I think limit-dates would pair nicely with format-dates, but don't have strong opinions yet (maybe I will after creating the new command and trying it out).

References

• Slack thread discussing example use cases