The story of RdfCalendar so far...
RDF Calendar Task Force Report
Libby Miller and Dan Connolly
Semantic Web Interest Group Meeting March 2004
speaker's note: 30 min, incl q/a
Presentation Overview
- Why RDF Calendar?
- Cool stuff you can do
- History
- Test-driven development
- Principles, Patterns
- Future directions
Why RDF Calendar?
- Calendars tools are great... (evolution, Apple iCal, korganizer, ...)
- a calendar, i.e. event data, is hard to separate from data about...
- people
- documents
- places
- ... resources of all sorts
- Gee... I know a description framework that just might work...
Cool Stuff: ToDo list from bug reports
- www-archive message headers are available in RDF
[closed] marks closed threads
- some rules convert them to RDF/iCalendary
- toIcal.py converts to .ics format
- developers subscribe to TODO list
details: bug status in .ics of 29Jan.
Cool Stuff: iCalendar from travel itinerary
- travel admin mails text itinerary
- dumped from database, probably
- nasty perl script makes RDF
- N3 rules convert to iCalendar vocabulary
- et voila...
- data re-use: maps:
see also: TravelTools
Cool Stuff: Event Sherpa
<blockquote>...Answer: Semaview is committed to the 'Intelligent Internet' or 'Semantic Web'. Whatever standard(s) emerge(s) as the defacto means of describing data in a machine understandable format, Semaview will adopt. Currently, RDF is best positioned to become the standard but Semaview recognizes that may change.</blockquote>
( product tour )
Cool Stuff: KANZAKI
by MasahideKanzaki.
History: Before the Workshop
- 1998: RFC2445
- 1998: XML
2001: TimBL's a Quick Look at iCalendar
Palm datebook RDF model by Dan Connolly
The Bristol Workshop: Inputs
2001: 'Hybrid' RDF iCalendar schema by Michael Arick, Libby Miller
2000: iCalendar RDF Model Dan Connolly
- apple iCal, mozilla calendar
Retsina by Terry Payne et al
The Bristol Workshop: Outputs
file workspace, esp. test data
- conversion tools adapted to new schema
see also: workshop report
Mailing list, IRC ScheduledChats
Creating a public papertrail and a mechanism for
- Resolving ambiguities, clarifying and understanding the iCalendar specification
- Identifying best practice in the RDF part of the translation
- Deciding whether to divert from the letter of the iCalendar specifcation in order to do something useful in RDF
- Using consistent patterns throughout the conversion
Documenting the decisions made and the reasons we made them (RdfCalendarDocumentation)
Publicly announcing decisions and changes to the schema on the RDF calendar mailing list
data-driven schema
- the iCalendar spec is too big
- start with data we believe/trust
BEGIN:VEVENT UID:20020630T230445Z-3895-69-1-7@jammer DTSTAMP:20020630T230445Z DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20020703 DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20020706 TRANSP:OPAQUE SEQUENCE:2 SUMMARY:Scooby Conference LOCATION:San Francisco DESCRIPTION:can't wait!\n CATEGORIES:Miscellaneous CLASS:PUBLIC END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT
- generate RDF by machine (ical2rdf.pl)
[
a :Vevent;
:categories "Miscellaneous";
:class "PUBLIC";
:description "can't wait!\n";
:dtend [
:date "2002-07-06" ];
:dtstamp [
:dateTime "2002-06-30T23:04:45Z" ];
:dtstart [
:date "2002-07-03" ];
:location "San Francisco";
:sequence "2";
:summary "Scooby Conference";
:transp "OPAQUE";
:uid "20020630T230445Z-3895-69-1-7@jammer" ]
- inspect the RDF to check that we still believe it
generate a schema from the results using swap/util/sniffschema
some technical detail in RdfCalendarSchema
Design Patterns
Ugly Details
Timezones
didn't follow InterpretationProperties. hmm... discussion
Properties with enumerated values
strings or URIs? - see PropertiesForNaming
Dates (background: workshop ref - dashes)
- iCalendar uses no dashes (20040301)
- XML Schema uses dashes (2004-03-01)
- we use dashes in RDF Calendar
Current Work
- extract schema from RFC by machine
- add OWL constraints
- round-trip testing
- Worked examples (code, documentation):
Further work
Things for others to try...
- Best practices for mixing with other vocabularies
use iTip for creating cardinality restrictions?
converting RRSAgent action items to RDFIcal for loading into personal calendars
- how to describe an event that starts "next summmer"...
Postscript: Reading/Refs
Leigh Dodds - Get Your FOAF On: Events
Libby/DanC's (failed) submission to WWW2004
RFC 2445 (iCalendar) html version text version
Masahide Kanzaki's introduction to iCalendar in RDF (mostly Japanese but also English text)