Syntactic profile of RDFiCal?

hi,

On the IETF calendar mailing list [1] they are currently talking about
reviving Xcal, which was an XML DTD for iCalendar. I was wondering if
we might want to think about a syntactic profile of RDFiCal, as the RSS
1.0 group did for RSS 1.0 with Leigh Dodd's Schematron schema [2], and
as we have been doing in the foaf project, again with Leigh's help [3].

There are many disadvantages to doing this, the main one being that with
all the RDF toolkits I have seen you can't control the output of the
RDF, making a specific syntactic output difficult or awkward to create.

Additionally, I think we might have to rethink some of the syntax that
is currently outputted by the iCalendar to RDF tools, as it often uses
parseType="resource", which can make it difficult to use other
namespaces with it, e.g.

http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/discovery/2003/09/foafcal/foaficaleg.rdf

shows an example of using foaf:Person with attendee. regardless of
whether this is the right way to do it, if we use

<attendee rdf:parseType='Resource'>

in a syntactic profile, then there's no way we can get the foaf:Person
tag in there. And that may not be too important for some people who
focus on properties, but our foaf experience suggests that many people
focus on objects when manipulating foaf files for display (and don't do
any inference from the schema).

These caveats aside, I think an XML version of iCalendar that could be
parsed and used by pure XML tools might be very well recieved, and
we've done a lot of the hard work already. It'd be annoying to have
another XML format in this space, although we could specify mappings to
it if it was created.

What do you think?

Libby


[1] http://www.imc.org/ietf-calendar/mail-archive/msg11885.html
[2] http://www.ldodds.com/rss_validator/1.0/
[3] http://rdfweb.org/pipermail/rdfweb-dev/2003-August/011890.html (see
thread for useful discussion of some of the potential issues)

Received on Tuesday, 16 December 2003 10:05:26 UTC