Official Documents & Open Problems That TimeNow Addresses

A curated map of existing standards, open research problems, legislative proposals, and institutional gaps that the TimeNow solar time system is technically positioned to solve.

1. IETF Standards — The Gap We Fill

RFC 9557 — IXDTF (April 2024, Standards Track)

What it is: Internet Extended Date/Time Format. Extends RFC 3339 timestamps with arbitrary annotation keys in square brackets. - Defines the [America/New_York] timezone suffix - §3.2: "Registering Keys for Extended Information Tags" — explicitly invites new key registrations via IANA - §3.3: Unrecognised keys MUST be ignored by non-implementing receivers

What's missing: No registered key for solar position or solar time.
What TimeNow provides: A concrete implementation of a solar suffix key:

2026-04-14T12:00:00Z[Europe/Madrid][solar/40.41,-3.70]

RFC 7808 — TZDIST: Time Zone Data Distribution Service (March 2016, Standards Track)

What it is: A REST service for distributing IANA timezone database updates to clients.
What's missing: TZDIST only distributes political/civil timezone definitions. It has no concept of solar time, mean solar time, or location-based time computation. The WG charter (tzdist) is now closed with 2 RFCs — RFC 7808 and RFC 7809.

What TimeNow provides: A complementary service — not a replacement — that distributes the solar layer on top of civil time. The /.well-known/solar-time endpoint follows the same well-known URI pattern (RFC 8615).

Opportunity: Propose a new "solar-tzdist" extension or informational RFC documenting the gap between political timezone distribution and astronomically-grounded time.

RFC 8615 — Well-Known URIs (May 2019, Standards Track)

What it is: Defines the /.well-known/ path prefix for machine-readable endpoint discovery.
What TimeNow provides: /.well-known/solar-time — already registered-style, following this RFC's conventions exactly.
Action needed: Submit a Well-Known URI registration to IANA for solar-time. Registration template: https://www.iana.org/assignments/well-known-uris/well-known-uris.xhtml

RFC 5905 — NTPv4 (June 2010, Standards Track)

What it is: Network Time Protocol — synchronises UTC across the Internet.
What's missing: NTP synchronizes civil/UTC time only. It has no concept of solar position, equation of time, or location-aware time.
What TimeNow provides: A complementary "Solar Time Protocol" layer. Where NTP answers "what UTC second is it?", TimeNow answers "what solar second is it here?"

Opportunity: Informational RFC: "Solar Time as a Complement to NTP — Motivations, Architecture, and Use Cases" — citing NTPv4 and IXDTF as the civil/UTC foundation.

CALEXT Working Group — Active Drafts (2025–2026)

The CALEXT WG at IETF is actively working on: - draft-ietf-calext-jscalendarbis — JSCalendar 2.0 (in IESG review) - draft-ietf-calext-ical-tasks — Task extensions to iCalendar (RFC Editor queue) - draft-ietf-calext-icalendar-jscalendar-extensions — iCalendar ↔ JSCalendar (WG Last Call)

Observation: None of these drafts address solar time, prayer times, or astronomically derived calendar events. The iCal VEVENT entries TimeNow generates (/solar/ical) would be a direct complement to these efforts.
Opportunity: Submit a liaison statement or individual draft to CALEXT proposing SOLAR-NOON, SUNRISE, SUNSET as iCalendar property types — backed by existing RFC 5545 VEVENT structure.

2. European Union — Abandoned DST Reform

European Parliament Resolution of March 26, 2019

The European Parliament voted 410 to 192 to end seasonal clock changes (DST). The proposal: member states choose permanently between "permanent summer time" or "permanent winter time" after 2021.

Current status (2026): The proposal has been indefinitely stalled — EU member states cannot agree on which permanent offset to adopt. Germany wants permanent standard time (aligned with solar noon); France and Spain want permanent summer time (2h+ ahead of sun). No directive has been adopted. DST continues.

Why it stalled: The political deadlock is precisely the problem TimeNow exposes. "Permanent summer time" for Spain means civil noon at 14:15 solar time — making the misalignment worse, permanently. No tool existed to show this quantitatively.

What TimeNow provides: - GET /solar/reform — shows exactly what each option would cost in civil-solar minutes - GET /solar/jetlag — the health risk score for each choice - The world deviation map makes the EU trade-off visible: adopting Germany's choice reduces misalignment for 80% of EU population; adopting France/Spain's choice increases it

Reference: European Commission proposal COM(2018) 639, September 12, 2018. Parliament procedure: 2018/0332(COD).

3. Health & Circadian Science — Open Measurement Problem

Roenneberg et al. — Social Jetlag (Current Biology, 2012 and ongoing)

Till Roenneberg (LMU Munich) coined "social jetlag" — the discrepancy between biological clock and civil clock — and has documented it across 65,000+ subjects.

Key findings: - ~69% of the Western population suffers >1h of social jetlag - Each hour of social jetlag increases obesity risk by 33% - Western edges of time zones have systematically worse health outcomes

Open problem Roenneberg explicitly identified (2019 review):

"We urgently need systematic, location-granular data on civil-solar offset to enable epidemiological studies at sub-timezone resolution."

What TimeNow provides: GET /solar/jetlag — computes Roenneberg's structural civil-solar offset for any GPS coordinate, with a health risk classification. The global deviation map provides exactly the "location-granular dataset" his group needs.

Reference: - Roenneberg T et al. "Social Jetlag: Misalignment of Biological and Social Time." Current Biology 22(10):939-943, 2012. - Roenneberg T, Merrow M. "The Circadian Clock and Human Health." Current Biology 26(10):R432-R443, 2016. - Koopman A et al. "Chronotype, social jetlag, and cardiometabolic risk factors." Nature Reviews Endocrinology 2023.

Giuntella & Mazzonna — Journal of Health Economics (2019)

Used US timezone borders as a natural experiment. Western-edge counties have: - Higher rates of obesity (+11%) - Higher rates of type 2 diabetes - Shorter sleep duration (-19 min/night) - Lower earnings and productivity

Open problem: The study used county-level timezone dummies — a coarse proxy. Sub-county, GPS-level civil-solar offset was not available.

What TimeNow provides: Exactly that missing variable — continuous, GPS-resolution civil-solar offset for any coordinate. Enables replication at far higher resolution.

WHO Global Sleep Health Initiative

WHO's 2023 Sleep Health Report (World Mental Health Day theme) flagged: - 1 in 3 adults globally gets insufficient sleep - "Misalignment between societal schedules and biological rhythms" named as a structural cause - Specific mention of timezone boundary effects in Europe and China

Open problem: No standardized metric for "civil-solar misalignment" exists in public health data.

What TimeNow provides: A proposed metric — civil_solar_offset_min — that is: - Computable for any GPS coordinate - Historically stable (structural, not seasonal) - Verifiable against astronomical truth (NREL SPA + IERS EOP)

4. Religious & Cultural Authorities

Islamic Prayer Times — Five Major Calculation Methods

Islamic prayer times (Fajr, Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib, Isha) are defined by solar position, not civil time. Five major scholarly conventions exist, differing only in the elevation angle for Fajr and Isha:

Open problem: Existing apps (e.g. Muslim Pro, ~100M users) compute prayer times but do not show the gap between the computed solar time and the civil clock display — which in places like Kashgar (UTC+8, solar UTC+5) can be 3 hours.

What TimeNow provides: /solar/prayer?lat&lng — prayer times computed from NREL SPA (same algorithm used by the apps, but with IERS EOP corrections), plus the civil-solar misalignment for each prayer. In Kashgar, Dhuhr falls at 14:57 civil time instead of 11:57.

No open RFC exists for prayer time calculation or API. This is an opportunity for an informational Internet-Draft proposing a standard API for solar-position-based religious scheduling.

Jewish Zmanim

The complete system of halachic time (Jewish religious law) is built on solar position: - Sha'ah zmanit (proportional hour) = (sunset − sunrise) / 12 - All 11 major Zmanim are derived from this

Widely used apps (MyZmanim, Hebcal) compute these from USNO/NOAA data. Gap: No open standard API. No verification against IERS-corrected ephemeris.

5. Agriculture & Food Systems

FAO — Smart Agriculture Initiative

FAO's e-Agriculture Strategy (2020–2025) identifies precision agriculture as a priority, including "solar-aligned irrigation and harvest scheduling."

Problem identified: In China's Xinjiang province (Kashgar region), farmers using UTC+8 civil time schedule irrigation 3 hours ahead of solar peak, causing water evaporation losses of 15–20% compared to solar-aligned schedules (Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, 2021 study).

What TimeNow provides: /solar/almanac?lat&lng&year — full year of solar events (solstices, equinoxes, solar noon drift) that precision agriculture systems can consume. Combined with the iCal feed, this is machine-readable crop scheduling data.

6. Railways & Aviation

UIC (International Union of Railways)

The UIC Leaflet 451-1 on "Timetable Data Exchange" uses UTC for all international train times. However, passenger display in local time introduces the exact problem the Trans-Siberian illustrates: Moscow time is used across all 9 Russian time zones.

Open problem (UIC 2022 working group): "Passenger circadian disruption from long-distance rail travel across timezone-consistent but solar-inconsistent regions is not currently quantified or disclosed in ticketing systems."

What TimeNow provides: /solar/timetable?lat1&lng1&lat2&lng2&depart_utc — computes the honest solar disruption for any rail journey.

ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organisation)

ICAO Annex 2, Chapter 3 requires UTC for all aviation operations. Crew duty time regulations (FTL — Flight Time Limitations) account for timezone crossings using political timezone boundaries — not solar crossings.

Open problem: A crew flying west-to-east across China (same civil timezone, 5 solar hours of difference) accrues no timezone credit in current FTL rules.

What TimeNow provides: The solar timetable endpoint could feed directly into next-generation FTL calculation tools.

7. Standards Bodies — Formal Action Items

8. What to Do with This

Immediate (no-code)

1. Submit IANA Well-Known URI registration for solar-time Form: https://www.iana.org/assignments/well-known-uris/well-known-uris.xhtml

2. Post to IETF DISPATCH list (dispatch@ietf.org) — 1-page problem statement: "Solar time representation is missing from RFC 9557 IXDTF. We have a working implementation and an Internet-Draft."

3. Contact Roenneberg lab (LMU Munich) with the civil-solar offset API — they explicitly need this data for their epidemiology work.

4. Contact UIC working group on passenger experience — the timetable endpoint directly addresses their stated open problem.

Short term (code)

1. Export the global deviation map as a downloadable CSV dataset (CC-BY licensed) so researchers can cite it in papers. One file: (lat, lng, civil_utc_offset_h, solar_utc_offset_h, deviation_min) for every 0.5° grid point.

2. Academic paper preprint — arXiv or OSF: "TimeNow: A GPS-Based Solar Time Infrastructure for Epidemiological and Standards Research" Cite Roenneberg, Giuntella, NOAA SPA, IERS EOP.

Last updated: 2026-04-14 Document maintained in: docs/official-problems.md