Re: relationship to iCalendar

On Monday, July 30, 2001, at 06:14  PM, Will Holcomb wrote:
> I am working on this for where I go to school and I have two primary
> useage scenarios:
<snip />

These sound like wonderful usecases for RDF, and also very much 
in line with work other members of the group are doing. (Most of 
us are away at a conference, and that's probably why the rest 
haven't gotten to your email yet. I think that doing this work 
in line with the iCalendar schema we're developing would 
definitely be worthwhile because of the overlap of tools, etc.


> 1. How close is this group to a stable draft of a RDF calendar
>     specification?

I think we're definitely getting there. The iCalendar hybrid 
schema is out there, waiting for folks to come in with 
implementation experience. I know that Dan Connolly has been 
thinking about some iCalendar <-> iCalendar/RDF converters to 
test the schema.

> 2. What is the authoritative place to look for the current 
> draft version
>     if such a thing exists?

I believe the latest version is at:

http://ilrt.org/discovery/2001/06/schemas/ical-full/hybrid.rdf

> 3. How closely does this specification model the iCalendar structure?

It was designed to model the structure as closely as was reasonable.

> 4. What sort of a time frame would you estimate for the 
> development of a
>     robust implementation from the ground up in java done by a single
>     person? (This is likely not my situation on every point, 
> but it is a
>     good reference I think.)

Well, you know how things go with programmers and time 
estimates, I'm sure. ;-) I'll refrain to comment on this 
question except to say that I don't think it should take an 
unreasonable amount of time. A month or two of focused hacking 
should probably be more than enough to do it... oops, there I go 
shooting my mouth off with a time estimate.

> 5. Is it feasible for a single person to undertake an 
> implementation in a
>     reasonable amount of time (4 months?)

Oh, I'm sure.

> 6. What references would you recommend for becoming more 
> familiar with the
>     concepts necessary to work on an implementation?

You should probably try to read through the schema as well as 
some related instance data. For example, here is an 
iCalendar/RDF description of the conference that many of us are 
attending this week (SWWS):

http://ilrt.org/discovery/2001/06/content/swws2001-07-30.rdf

There's also some links, and, I think, a query demo linked from:

http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/calendar/

(and some others in the archives).

I'd also take a look at the output you get from the Java RDF 
parser "ARP":

http://www-uk.hpl.hp.com/people/jjc/arp/

as well as the associated Jena API.


> Any information you have would be greatly appreciated.

I hope this has been helpful,
--
[ "Aaron Swartz" ; <mailto:me@aaronsw.com> ; <http://www.aaronsw.com/> ]

Received on Thursday, 2 August 2001 00:58:36 UTC