Comments on: Syndication of rules versus syndication of data

By: Aerik

Aerik — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 00:07:12 +0000

I’m working on a prototype event aggregator for the purposes of promoting event syndication. I’ve some research in this area, and wondered if you had pointers to information in the area of event syndication. What I’ve got so far is a few rdf namespaces one coult use to extend an Atom feed and a prototype that reads and caches Google Calendar feeds (working on a search engine). I plan to add the ability to parse ical “feeds” since it seems more events are available as an ical file than as atom/rss, but really, importing an ical file should work just as well… I’ve seen that Google Calendar will re-syndicate an Ical file as an atom feed.

Anyway, got any research/knowledge in this area you’d care to share?

Best Regards,
Aerik

By: Tim

Tim — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 11:47:51 +0000

Will Eventful import iCalendar? Seems like it ought to, since they are members of CalConnect (http://www.calconnect.org) – the consortium trying to improve calendar interoperability (Microsoft is a member too, I believe)

By: Jon Udell

Jon Udell — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:36:02 +0000

> did Lotus Agenda do this correctly back in the day?

Can’t remember :-)

> Also, is there a way to get a ping of sorts when someone
> responds to this comment?

That’s a good question. I thought wordpress.com did per-article comment feeds, but I’m not finding that feature now that you mention it.

By: Edward Ocampo-Gooding

Edward Ocampo-Gooding — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 06:25:36 +0000

I’m not sure if this was mentioned earlier in the series, but did Lotus Agenda do this correctly back in the day?

Also, is there a way to get a ping of sorts when someone responds to this comment? Having to come back every once in a while just to check is pretty suboptimal.

By: Jon Udell

Jon Udell — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 16:05:44 +0000

> So, your program which ingests the iCal data would have to
> “expand” it.

Yes, I’ve now had occasion to do that. Of course many expansions are infinite unless arbitrarily bounded.

Eventful does a bounded expansion for you, and doesn’t pass you the rule, it passes you the data, when you ask for an iCal feed.

Google Calendar passes the rule which you get to expand.

Interesting tradeoffs. Ideally you could ask the iCal provider, with a parameter on the URL, whether or not to expand and if so how far.

By: Tim

Tim — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 05:06:25 +0000

In the iCalendar (RFC2445) spec, the RRULE isn’t a script that gets run by some calendar server, it just describes the rules and exceptions. So, your program which ingests the iCal data would have to “expand” it.

One thing to attempt: create a new calendar in Outlook, open the .ics file, then export all to iCalendar – I _think_ Outlook will “expand” it.

By: engtech

engtech — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:56:20 +0000

The combination of Chronic + Duration gives you some amazing date flexibility.

Duration is Chronic in reverse, go from seconds to something the user can intuitively read and understand.