RSS/schemas

It's great to see so much traffic on this list suddenly. Just a few
thoughts.

Dan just brought the RSS event module to my attention. I would love to
have a schema which can be used or part-used in RSS. The mechanisms for
syndication of calendar data would already be there because of the
many tools which are available for RSS 1.0.

Similarly, I think some of my demos show that you can do a lot by having
calendar data described in RDF, even if most events don't use the entire
schema.

But...we should not ignore the huge amount of effort and thought that's
gone into iCalendar and Skical. And simply describing iCalendar or
SkiCal in XML would not be an interesting exercise, since iCalendar and
SkiCal RFCs already provide a file format for events data. RDF allows
you to combine arbitrary data whether about events, people, documents
and so on. This is worth doing.

I did a presentation last week with Greg Fitzpatrick of SkiCal, where
he provided a summary of calendaring in the IETF Calsch working group, 
and I tried to explain what we could do with RDF calendar data. For
example, when you're going to a conference, you want to know who is
speaking where and when. You want to know what they're going to present
- title, description; who they are - name, affiliation; but also how
about - where they worked before that; what working groups and commitees
they've been on; what else they've attended recently; what they look
like; who they've collaborated with. This information is out there
already, and much of the events data is in an iCalendar or vCalendar
format. My aim is to enable this information to be combined, and use the
existing formats as robust, well-thought-out structures which can be
reflected into RDF.

cheers

Libby

Received on Thursday, 31 May 2001 05:09:57 UTC