ISO8601 is a way to represent time. This format may be used in JSON strings and hence in tincan to store time. To implment it we need to install this gem http://rubygems.org/gems/iso8601

require 'rubygems'
require 'iso8601'

time = ISO8601::DateTime.new('2016-12-24T15:23')
puts time
puts time.to_time # prints output in ruby