- From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 09 Nov 1999 22:29:24 -0600
- To: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
Have you seen these web-based calendar apps? http://calendar.yahoo.com/ http://www.dailydrill.com/ They're cool, but they're closed-world: I can schedule a dailydrill meeting and invite somebody to add it to their calendar, but only if they're a dailydrill user. Gee thanks; if I want a closed-world solution, Notes and Exchange are much more mature. And... I can't make links from item descriptions to the rest of the web! I can say "I plan to be at XML '99 Dec 5-9" but I can't have XML '99 linked to the rest of the details! What a waste! Plus... I have a bunch of stuff about my schedule on pages in http://www.w3.org/ and I don't want to manually copy the data all over the place. I just want the computer to pore over my digital world and show me consolidated views of the information I've already recorded. In the IETF WG on calendaring http://www.imc.org/ietf-calendar/ they've developed an elaborate protocol and data model for this stuff. But I wonder... isn't there a simpler way? Can't I just litter my web and email messages with RDF statements, and then do a big graph merge? Then I should be able to do fairly straightforward style prolog queries like: what events am I expected to attend tomorrow? do I have any previous engagements for tomorrow at 2pm? A trickier question is: how about PalmPilot style syncing, i.e. write operations? if the displayed schedule is just a view of prior communications, then it's hard to say what it means to edit it... but in a way, this is a good model of the real world: a meeting isn't rescheduled just because you flip some bits on your desktop; it's rescheduled when you tell the expected participants of the new schedule. I haven't managed to do much hacking, but I'm trying to develop software to sync my pilot with web pages... XHTML web pages, at least; I don't really see how to do RDF syncing yet. I converted the contents of my pilot datebook ala: <h2>Fri, 18 Sep 1998</h2> <dl><TimedDayEntry day="1998-09-18"><dt><time>07:15</time> <duration>00:15</duration> run w/Bo</dt> </TimedDayEntry> <TimedDayEntry day="1998-09-18"><dt><time>09:00</time> <duration>01:00</duration> arch weekly</dt> </TimedDayEntry> <TimedDayEntry day="1998-09-18"><dt><time>10:30</time> <duration>01:00</duration> Danny, Rolf tour</dt> <dd><p>per RDF review 17Sep</p> <p></dd> </TimedDayEntry> ... </dl> It's not RDF, but (1) it displays OK in conventional HTML browsers, and (2) it records all the data from the pilot (except the crucial record IDs, which weren't included in the tab-separated-values dump I got from some .exe program that reads pilot desktop data files :-{) Anyway... more thoughts on the subject at: http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/drafts/web-research#when -- Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
Received on Tuesday, 9 November 1999 23:29:18 UTC