A Lightweight Timezone and Geospatial API as an Experimental Infrastructure for Temporal Reasoning
This working paper investigates how a lightweight, API-based service for timezone and city lookup can serve as an experimental infrastructure for reasoning about time, geography, and temporal boundaries in distributed systems. Rather than addressing timekeeping accuracy or proposing a universal timezone solution, the paper explores how constrained geospatial abstractions—such as region bounding boxes, proximity queries, and UTC offsets—can be operationalized through a simple HTTP interface.
The investigation is applied and exploratory in nature. It examines a FastAPI microservice that exposes timezone regions, cities, and spatial relationships through authenticated endpoints, focusing on design choices that prioritize clarity, inspectability, and ease of experimentation over completeness or real-time guarantees. The paper does not attempt to generalize findings across all temporal systems, nor does it evaluate performance or correctness against authoritative timezone databases.
As a working paper, this document presents observations derived from the current implementation rather than finalized conclusions. It frames questions about how developers and analysts reason about timezones when given simplified but explicit models, and how such models can support learning, prototyping, and exploratory analysis. The goal is to prepare the reader to think critically about temporal abstractions in software systems, not to prescribe a definitive solution.
General Information
Motivation
Timezones are a persistent source of complexity in distributed systems, analytics pipelines, and user-facing applications. Despite extensive documentation and standardized databases, errors related to offsets, daylight saving time, and geographic boundaries remain common. The motivation behind this investigation is to explore whether a deliberately simplified, query-oriented API can make temporal reasoning more explicit and approachable for practitioners.
The Timestamp API was designed as a public utility rather than a production-grade service. Its purpose is to provide a concrete, inspectable layer through which users can explore how time, location, and regional boundaries interact, without embedding complex timezone logic directly into each application.
Scope and assumptions
This work focuses on static timezone regions, city metadata, and geospatial proximity queries derived from predefined datasets. It assumes that timezone boundaries can be approximated through region groupings and bounding boxes, and that users are aware of the limitations inherent in such approximations.
The API is treated as an exploratory interface. It assumes moderate, non-adversarial usage and does not guarantee real-time correctness with respect to political or legal changes in timezone definitions.
Non-goals
This paper does not aim to replace authoritative timezone libraries, provide historical timezone transitions, or guarantee legal or calendrical accuracy. It does not address leap seconds, historical boundary changes, or fine-grained polygon-based timezone mapping. High availability, performance benchmarking, and production hardening are explicitly out of scope.
Status of the investigation
The system is considered experimental. Endpoints, data representations, and assumptions may change without notice. Observations reflect the current state of the implementation rather than a stable or finalized design.
