EventDiscovery

'How do I share and find RDF calendar documents?'

Having an RdfCalendar data format for data sharing is only useful if we figure out some ways of publishing and sharing these documents. So, you save your RDF calendar file online, what happens then?

rdf crawlers (such as FOAF 'scutters') might follow rdfs:seeAlso links to it from other documents
It might feed into event listings built from aggregated RDF data
eventually, will we see user-oriented directories such as iCalShare.com or topic-specific filtered directories such as radicalendar?

Related: the OpeningHoursUseCase describes a scenario where small businesses (amongst others) might expose calendar data on their Web sites, along with other details (photos, locations etc).

We need EventDiscovery strategies to find and aggregate this information once it's out there (and to encourage it to be put out there!).

Once we've harvested all this RDF/XML calendar data, how can we turn it back into ical syntax (.ics files) for desktop tools to consume?

toIcal.py provides one tool for doing this (uses Cwm's Python RDF API)

What obstacles do we face?

need RDF vocab for describing calendar documents
better packaging of rdf crawler tools
- Matt Biddulph's crawler is now bundled.
- RubyRdf now includes simple scutter code.
vocabulary stability? (won't get wide use until vocab declared stable -versus- won't declare stable until proves itself in use)

Discussion

#rdfig notes on SVG, calendar, geo overlap.
- GeoInfo
libby and danbri discuss extraction from wiki pages of event descriptions.
2003-04-23 #rdfig cal meeting discussions

Notes

There's some relationship to RSS here, though I'm not best sure how to describe it. Also aggregators like syndic8, and the publish/subscribe ping mechanisms used by MovableType and other weblogs.

-- DanBri - 26 Mar 2003