Re: a syntactic approach to RDF/ical interchange

I was planning on saying what I'm doing, perhaps now is the time. :-)

I use xCal to generate web pages. That's the xml version of iCalendar 
and will perhaps someday be a standard. :-) I have some tools I use to 
go from iCal to xCal and back that are mentioned here:
 
http://whiteboard.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?msgId=360121&listName=groupware
The tools are not pretty, they let me test. They do provide a round trip 
from iCal to xCal and back.

I'm working on getting calendar data into OpenOffice.org's spreadsheet 
and word processor. OOo provides filters to import/export xml. I have 
set up filters that work with xCal.

I have also worked a bit with Mozilla's calendar and intend to modify it 
to use calendar data from a mozilla datasource. Those datasources are 
rdf. I did a little poking around and think I can come up with a 
datasource that uses rdf to do the stuff that mozilla needs to have a 
claendar datasource and have the datasource use both xCal and rdf to 
model that calendar data. I will then take the rdf/xCal back to OOo and 
propose they use it when they build groupware tools.

I'm going to look at Dan's ics to rdf - icaltordf.pl.
   and all the other stuff mentioned
     in my spare time :-)

I have some ics files. I'll make them available.

and

I'm the groupware project lead at OOo. If anyone wants to help get Dan's 
rdf stuff working with OOo, come on down!
   http://whiteboard.openoffice.org/groupware/index.html

Gary

Dan Connolly wrote:
> Picking up from earlier discussion here in rdf-calendar...
> 
> "Dan Connolly has said to me that the iCalendar RDF schema is useful to
> him because it directly mapps to iCalendar itself, and that conversion
> between formats is just fine as far as he is concerned."
>  --
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-calendar/2002May/0000.html
> 
> That's pretty close to what I meant, but what I really
> meant was: an iCalendar RDF schema is useful *inasmuch*
> as it directly maps to iCalendar itself.
> 
> I took this approach rather literally in the last few months:
> I wrote the smallest (in time-to-develop) program that
> would extract ical info from an RDF KB and spit it out in
> ical format -- at least: in a format that evolution,
> my ical tool, groks.
> 
> I reported on this back in January...
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-calendar/2002Jan/0002.html
> 
> More recently, I started going the other way: taking
> my evoluiton .ics file and trying to convert it to
> RDF, with the minimum-time-to-develop perl hack.
> 
> For some reason, I started in
>   http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/2001/palmagent/
> on vcal2xml.pl . But after it started working,
> I decided I would integrated it more with
> the other SWAP PIM tools, so I put it at
>   http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/pim/ical2rdf.pl
> 
> While I was cleaning up and moving into swap/pim,
> I decided to take a sort of scruffy approach
> to building a schema: take some test data
>   http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/test/pim/testCal.ics
>   http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/test/pim/testTasks.ics
> convert it to RDF
>   http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/test/pim/testCal.rdf
>   http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/test/pim/testTasks.rdf
> and build a schema from whatever properties are used
> there:
>   http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/pim/ical
>   http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/pim/ical.rdf
>   http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/pim/ical.n3
> 
> Here are the rules for sniffing a schema from some data:
>   http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/util/sniffSchema.n3
> and the makefile that details how I did it:
>   http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/pim/Makefile
> 
> To close the loop, I just updated my toIcal.py
> tool to this swap/pim/ical namespace (the
> Jan 2002 version used the hybrid schema):
> 
>   http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/pim/toIcal.py
> 
> it still only supports a handful of properties,
> but it's enough to get flight info into
> my calendar. Well... actually, I haven't
> tested this updated code on that application.
> 
> I ought to close the loop: see what, if any, differences
> there are between my completely syntax drive/bottom-up
> ical schema and the hand-written ical schema.
> 
>   http://ilrt.org/discovery/2001/06/schemas/ical-full/hybrid.rdf
> 
> Meanwhile, I gather Libby isn't using
> the hybrid schema actively any more, so
> I'm not sure that's high on my priority list.
> 
> The main goal of these tools (toIcal.py and ical2rdf.pl)
> is interchange (import/export) with ical tools like
> evolution.
> 
> I hope to get clean round-tripping of my test .ics
> files eventually.
> 
> Does anybody have .ics files generated by some other
> tool? I could add that to my test data.
> 
> Also, if you find that the .ics generated by toIcal.py
> isn't accepted by some ical tool, please let me know.
> 
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 24 July 2002 08:33:50 UTC