Calendar sharing and synchronization

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