Describing timelines using RDFa and iCalendar - ideas, proposal

Hello,

Not sure if anyone will read this but I was thinking about how to
represent different sorts of timelines using HTML. Even though it's
possible to do this visually, none of the methods (e.g. [1],[2],[3]) I
found were quite right:

1. only a few gave a way of extracting the timeline so that it could be
used by a machine [which in turn could be used by a person]
2. none could describe "fuzzy" sequences of events: where you know how
long things will take, but not exactly when
3. very few could create a timeline without using JavaScript.


I struggled with and eventually gave up on using the timeline
ontology[4] and thought about how this could be done using iCalendar,
which is very common. I used an existing method of representing a
timeline in HTML and CSS[5], added the RDFa and wrote a parsing script +
XSLT to extract the data from the RDFa to create an iCalendar file.

You can see the timelines at:

http://www.coreymwamba.co.uk/testbed/styled-time.html

And you can read my thoughts on it here: 

http://www.coreymwamba.co.uk/testbed/timelines

I'm writing to ask for suggestions for improvement, etc.

All the best,

Corey Mwamba


[1]: http://timeline.verite.co/
[2]: http://www.timeglider.com/widget/index.php?p=intro
[3]: http://code.google.com/p/simile-widgets/wiki/Timeline
[4]: http://motools.sourceforge.net/timeline/timeline.html
[5]: http://mattbango.com/notebook/web-development/pure-css-timeline/


-- 
http://www.coreymwamba.co.uk

music = science + magic