Re: Including location, calendar and contact data in the ontology

In regards to calendar information, iCalendar looks promising and is 
defined by RFC 2445, see:

    http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2445

Tim Berners-Lee has done some work on recasting iCalendar in RDF, 
see:

    http://www.w3.org/2000/01/foo.html

The RDF schema is at:

    http://www.w3.org/2002/12/cal/ical

There has also been some work on XML representations of iCalendar, 
see:

    http://xml.coverpages.org/iCal.html

The wikipedia entry provides a convenient overview, see:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar

  Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett

On Tue, 27 Nov 2007, Dave Raggett wrote:

> Following the discussion at the recent face to face I would like to consider 
> how to extend the delivery context ontology to cover location, calendar and 
> contact info, based upon existing work.
>
> Privacy concerns are clearly very important for such data and this will act 
> as a brake on application developers. This is something I intend to address 
> with a forthcoming W3C workshop in 2Q'08. I am expecting the business models 
> for providing such services to move through a sequence of phases. A 
> proprietary walled garden approach is likely to give way to a more open 
> approach as the necessary standards are put in place, and this will in turn 
> enable a much bigger pool of developers to innovate with new kinds of 
> applications that exploit location, calendar and contact data.
>
> Work on the ontology for such data is a reasonable first step towards open 
> standards for web applications as the ontology is decoupled from specific 
> APIs and from the associated access control mechanisms. The extensions to the 
> delivery context ontology should in my opinion be based upon existing work, 
> e.g.
>
> 1) For location we could leverage
>
>  - JSR179, a location API for Java midlets
>  - GPX, an XML format for exchanging location data
>  - EXIF extensions for tagging photos with location
>
> 2) For calendar info, we could leverage vCal and iCalendar
>
> 3) For contact info, we could leverage vCard
>
> Google has been doing some potentially related work on common APIs for 
> building social applications on many websites, see:
>
>    http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/
>
> It currently covers personal profiles, friend relationships, actions such as 
> uploading a video file, and a persistence API for accessing data held on the 
> website. It is therefore reasonable to envisage an expanding collection of 
> APIs for distributed socially oriented web applications, for example access 
> to location as part of your friend's presence information.
>
> We need to discuss the role of standards for ontologies as a means to avoid 
> market fragmentation, and how to avoid bottle-necks in the development of 
> such standards.
>
> I will try to post some more detailed suggestions prior to this week's 
> telecon.
>
> Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
>

Received on Wednesday, 5 December 2007 12:06:32 UTC