Re: Article from Wired News (fwd)

re http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,55244,00.html

> nice little article forwarded to me by Paul.
> However, I'd disagree that this provides us with a direct rationale for
> RDF calendar. I think we need to have some very clear usecases as to why
> we need something more than icalendar.
>
> Libby

Yes and yes! The key thing we need to stress re RDF calendar sharing is
that it isn't just about a change of file format. iCalendar text files are
ok as is;  and a direct XML version of iCal (excuse ignorance: is that
what xCal is?)  is fine too.

The reason we (or I anyway :) care about having an RDF representation of
calendar / event info is simple: data mixing. RDF, unlike XML, was
designed to make data merging easy. We can mix RDF event info with more
RDF information about the people, places, organisations, purposes etc of
those events. Each kind of thing _may_ often have an associated special
purpose file format (eg. vCard for people) that is widely used for
exchanging descriptions.

A goal of the RDF project and for the Semantic Web is to provide a
framework in which these descriptions could be mixed, so that common
storage, query languages, APIs etc could be used. It is hard to write a
query that draws on bits of person-description, bits of event-description
and bits of location-description if there is a different file format for
each kind of thing. XML at face value simply solves this problem, since
descriptions of all these things could be migrated to XML-based file
formats.  RDF provides an additional layer of conventions and discipline
on top of XML to ensure that independently written XML descriptions of
things can be usefully combined, even if the creators of those XML
DTDs/schemas (aka file formats) were designed without any central
coordination.

This is mostly not specific to events and calendars. The reason I'm
particulary interested in rdf-calendar is that events, being 'things that
happen', can be a central organising concept in many kinds of
descriptions. I'm hoping we can use the core strucures from an rdf-cal
vocab to augment lots of different kinds of RDF description. Basically,
whenever we want to keep an RDF description of something that happened
(workflow, transaction logs etc.), it'd be nice to have one way of doing
it instead of a dozen. And for that one-way to be readily transformed into
.ical files and other documents that are used by calendar-centric tools...

Dan



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Received on Tuesday, 24 September 2002 17:36:12 UTC