Re: representing scheduled events

Mark,

Your question may be quick, but I doubt there is any quick answer.  What
you are looking for is a general way of expressing first occurence plus
recurring interval (and possibly last occurence) My first guess would be
to model it with the full range of possibilities that the data types in
XML Schemas would allow.  A couple of valid possibilities within this
context are "dateTime" plus "duration" (duration treated as a recurring
interval), and "date" plus "gDay".  Unfortunately, the folks that
brought us XML Schemas and the Gregorian ("g") date datatypes didn't
give us a day-of-the-week, which seems critical to what you want to do. 
You could of course make up a dayOfWeek datatype.  

Also, I'm wondering if you are concerned only with events that happen in
an instant of time.  Modeling events of non-zero duration obviously
requires some way of modeling that duration.

Carl Benkley
Lead Information Systems Engineer
MITRE Corporation


Mark Nottingham wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I sent the attached message to the IETF calsch WG a few days ago, and
> haven't gotten anything back. Does anyone here have strong feelings
> about this, and/or a reference?
> 
> I'd like to see something moving towards a (hopefully short) standard
> here, as there are a number of different application domains. Or
> perhaps I'm just missing one that already exists (crosses fingers)?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> --
> Mark Nottingham, Research Scientist
> Akamai Technologies (San Mateo, CA USA)
> 
>   ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Subject: representing scheduled events
> Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 14:01:49 -0700
> From: Mark Nottingham <mnot@akamai.com>
> To: ietf-calendar@imc.org
> 
> Hello,
> 
> Just a quick question. I've seen several fields where it's desireable
> to model a scheduled event and then represent it in some form (XML or
> a simple string, usually).
> 
> For example, I'd want to model and express:
>   - "Every Tueday at 6pm"
>   - "The first Monday of the month at noon"
>   - "Every other day at midnight"
> 
> Possible uses include for HTTP cache freshness, recurring events in
> RSS news feeds, and policy updates for things like P3P. In general,
> I'm talking about representing a publication schedule.
> 
> Does calsch have a solution for this, or any thoughts that would
> point an effort to develop such a thing in the right direction?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> --
> Mark Nottingham, Research Scientist
> Akamai Technologies (San Mateo, CA USA)

Received on Tuesday, 17 April 2001 16:07:09 UTC