RE: Article from Wired News (fwd)

Yes, Libby and Dan, you are absolutely correct. I shouldn't have put an
incomplete thought out there, I saw the article and pushed it out as I
was leaving the office.

I agree with Dan's comments... obviously we don't need rdf as an
exchange mechanism because iCal, as evidenced by the article, is
beginning to do quite well on its own. (This will likely be beneficial
to the xCal draft because the XML representation is easier to work with
programmatically). To complete my thought, the article is important
because it demonstrates the pent up demand for sharing event data
between calendars over the internet. If we were to take a "Crossing the
Chasm" viewpoint... the innovators and early adopters of calendaring
have been at this for awhile, building tools, generating ideas,
developing calendar interoperability software. Yet, this has been beyond
the reach of the more pragmatic early majority, who require what Moore
terms a whole product solution. This is why the Mozilla Calendar project
and Apple's iCal are important. The publish and subscribe metaphor for
calendars works well, is easily grasped, and provides a solution for
those who realize they have needed this capability. Word of mouth is
spreading this to those who didn't realize they needed it but can
readily see the benefits. I believe these innovations will create
critical mass for simple calendar information exchange; forcing other
vendors to open up and make it easy to accept RFC2445 data.

So why is this important? Once user's adopt open standard internet
calendaring, they will be receptive to what has seemed like an abstract
and distant concept, the semantic web. If I subscribe to a college
football schedule into my calendar, I begin to want to browse around. I
know that the Univ. of South Carolina is playing Temple Univ. at 7pm.
But what is the University of South Carolina's mascot, who is their
coach, who are the players, going into the football game you may want to
know their current record of wins and loses, the football team is in
what division, what other teams are in that division, what are the
current standings in the division, the school is located where and
offers what programs, who is the department head of the Computer Science
and Engineering dept, how do I apply for admissions, etc. This becomes
possible as we traverse up the layers from Data -> Information ->
Knowledge. RDF is an enabling technology and in this regard this makes
the work important.

This of course is beside the fact that I want many personal software
agents to be invited to a meeting. They will communicate via an Agent
Communication Language. The content language of their messages will be
RDF and these messages will express RFC2445 information. The agents will
negotiate via some interaction protocol to arrive at a date when all
those invited can attend. Once agreement has been reached, the RDF data
will be converted to iCal for storage in a standards compliant
calendaring system (like Mozilla). BTW, a CAP server would be nice too!
(I know they are being worked on).

Regards,

Paul

PS - Who is going to volunteer to publish all relevant semantic
web/Agent conference dates, to include CFP dates, workshop and tutorial
dates, etc. in an iCal file that I can subscribe to ;-).

> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-rdf-calendar-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:www-rdf-calendar-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Libby Miller
> Sent: Tuesday, September 24, 2002 5:18 PM
> To: www-rdf-calendar@w3.org
> Cc: connolly@w3.org
> Subject: Article from Wired News (fwd)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 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
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2002 17:05:06 -0400
> From: Paul Buhler <pbuhler@cs.cofc.edu>
> To: libby.miller@bristol.ac.uk, 'Terry Payne' <trp@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
> Subject: Article from Wired News
> 
> Not sure if you saw this, but it provides rational for why 
> this work is
> important.
> 
http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,55244,00.html

Paul

Received on Wednesday, 25 September 2002 00:05:07 UTC