Background on Time Ranges

This standard specifies time ranges with the start time inclusive and end time exclusive due to several issues that can happen with end time inclusive ranges:

• Inclusive end times force clients to specify the end time with high decimal precision hoping that they have used enough precision to get all events for the period. For example, a range of events from 00:00:00 to 23:59:59 would not include an event that occurred at 23:59:59.5. No matter how precise (e.g. 23:59:59.999), there would be a chance of missing events.
• Exclusive end times also make it easier to implement rolling time windows since the end time of the range (regardless of the length of the range) can simply be used as the beginning of the next range without the risk of capturing data twice if a data item happens to exist at a range boundary.

In addition, this standard favors this ISO-8601 time range format over the oft-used separate “start time” and “end time” fields/parameters to emphasize official standards conformance.