I see many different ways that date is presented. Sometimes I do not understand
which number is which. I went looking to see what standards might be out there.
These are the two I found and to me they make sense. Therefore I choose to put
my date into the format yyyy-mm-dd according to the following standards.

ISO   (International Organization for standardization)
ISO 8601 defines date and time standards information, Info from:
http://www.iso.ch/
http://www.w3.org
ANSI  (American National Standards Institute)
ANSI X3.30-1997 defines date and time standards information, Info from:
http://www.ansi.org/
http://www.geminfo.org/Workbench/Metadata/syntax_date.html