So is this OpenEvents?

Greetings from sunny San Diego.  Morning after posting Google/Internet Archive, Meet Mr. Event we threw the kids in the WRX and headed south for some R&R with friends and family.  So now that I've snuck into the local wifi cafe I'm very gratified to discover more people, projects, and conversations about this events vision.   For sake of clarity, from now on I think I'll start using Marc Canter's OpenEvents moniker -- seems like the same/right philosophy, and appears to still be a green-field project.

Here are just a few additional links I've found related to OpenEvents vision, although I haven't had time to fully dig through all this yet:

• EventsML, an IPTC effort for an XML vocab standard for, "event publishing, event planning, and event coverage."



• ESS  the "Event Share Specification" for, "assisting in the publishing and distribution of event (e.g. meetings,
  conferences, holidays) information."



• WhizSpark's broader thoughts on social networking and events



• CivicSpace are some veterans of the Dean campaign building a, "...platform that empowers collective action inside
  communities and cohesively connects remote groups of supporters."



• Who What When Where XML is headed up by Hanan Cohen, who believes, "people should be able to publish where and when they will be, and
  others should be able do discover those facts and arrange to meet them."

Among many others!  I haven't yet digested the comments/trackbacks/new info, but clearly people are looking and addressing events from many different angles and biz models. And it's all "just software," so it's doable.  Hard part is herding cats, aligning interests so collaboration, real work, and follow-through happen.

Still getting my mind around all this, but I'm looking forward to continuing to connect with interested and engaged parties.  But my main event right now is quality time with family until the new year, so I think I'll idle my mind and keyboard until '05.  Have a great holiday if you're still reading this!

Google/Internet Archive, Meet Mr. Event

In the spirit of "tags are the new black," here's a vision for how event and calendar management should be handled by 2006:  Wouldn't it be grand if all events in the world, from a garage sale in Lexington to a tech conference in SF, could be automatically discovered (Google), stored in one central, public domain, web services accessible database (Internet Archive), where the events could then be categorized (Topix), community rated and recommended (Amazon/Netflix/Last.FM), personally tagged (Flickr/del.icio.us), and ultimately custom-fed (PubSub) directly to your calendar device of choice (Calconnect)?

Cool, where do I sign up? I Could have used this to promote our now defunct SF Web Services SIG, which was done "by hand," one site/email list at a time.  Not to mention the relative difficulty when you go searching for a good event in your area...(not to knock workit.com or craigslist.org -- thanks guys!)  But I want this uber event service now!

So past and current pains combined with threads followed, dots connected, and small wheels turned since last week's Berkeley Calendar Project post create this mashup event service vision.  Actually, people are talking about this vision in so many words.  Dr. Bob Glushko and Allison Bloodworth et al are leading part of the effort by trying to bring sanity and sharing to the 80+ event calendars of UC Berkeley.  Tantek Çelik and other folks working on hCalendar talk about using your web site as your API,

"...bloggers can discuss events in their blog(s) in such a way that spiders
and other aggregators can retrieve such events, automatically convert
them to iCalendar, and use them in any iCalendar application or service.",

Kevin Hughs at zLab writes,

"The potential for applications that make use of networked, time-driven information is
huge. Today's portals have no concept of event personalization or collaboration.
Today's applications have only the most basic concept of integrating with or subscribing
to time-driven data. And there are no providers of horizontal event-based services. ... Software and
the Internet has freed online music from its proprietary data and application jails, why
not do the same with events? The traditional calendar interface deserves a overhaul.",

Marc Canter chimes in,

"I wonder if they wanna help put up shared XML servers of Events - scraped from throughout the web?",

the Calconnect.org folks proclaim,

"Our members’ intent is to enable calendaring and scheduling tools and applications to enter the mainstream of computing," said Dave Thewlis. "After email, the World Wide Web, and instant messaging, calendaring and scheduling capabilities are what business people and consumers will really care about.",

and many many others I have yet to discover [add more in comments].  Yes, A few people are already doing similar stuff, like upcoming.org, rsscalendar.com, openeventscom, whizspark.com, evdb.com(?), and most likely Google Labs (?) [any more?].  But for starters, from what I can glean these efforts rely on people coming and manually submitting events, rather than auto-discovery and aggregation via spidering --> problem of db critical mass.

So let's make one!  Let's combine something practical and "standards-based" (ie., iCalendar/XHTML) like hCalendar, but extend it with the rich UBL-inspired semantics of a Berkeley Event Model.  Now that everyone agrees, let's move one.  We need open source tools so event producers (even for my yard sale) can list their events on their blogs/web sites, like they already do, but also be sure to use valid markup.  (Note: people are motiviated to promote their events -- no prodding necessary)  Then we need an open source spider, a bunch of disks and some linux boxes, a REST API, open source recommendation and reputation/rating/tagging engines (eg., tweaked openscrobbler + ??/??/??), and some pub-sub and feed generators.  And to top it off, let's make the database and service usable by all (eg., some kind of creative commons), so we can unleash the creativity of the world to build custom interfaces via our web services API.  Easy stuff in these days of inspiration from  Amazon/Google/PayPal/eBay/SForce, open source, wikis, bugzilla, and PayPal donate buttons.  Right?

The law of ideas says that at least 6 (or is it 8?) people are either building or have already built this exact event service -- and I haven't found it yet.  Any pointers?  If not, anyone want to build this monster?

blogazul, a Twist on the Semantic Wiki

I had the pleasure of meeting Jean Sini yesterday.  He's behind a new project called blogazul, which in its current state is an integrated weblog/wiki system similar to SocialText and SnipSnap.  The interesting twist is what Jean is calling a "semantic wiki," but with a different interpretation of Semantic from Platypus Wiki or discussions elsewhere.  Blogazul is leveraging XML Schema instead of RDF.  From blogazul.com:

"The idea is quite simple: while we maintained the “edit-in-place”
principle that makes wiki so easy to use, we added a whole new
dimension: a wiki page can now be structured in XML. And instead of
typing that XML directly, or viewing it in raw form, it is presented,
both for reading and editing, through style-sheets. The goal: you focus
on the content only, and you get the structure, the rich layout, and
the automated functionality derived from the fact that the data types
of the content are known. Just like smart tags, the semantic wiki style
sheets, based on the fact that there is an address in your page,
exposes automated features like yellow pages, driving directions, maps,
etc."

This is an interesting architecture that follows a more formal model-based approach to programming a wiki, which I talked about previously in my Big Red Button post.  Definitely similar in spirit to what JotSpot, Twiki, and XWiki are doing RE: creating application platforms on a wiki base, but instead of user-friendly scripting or programming wiki objects, XML Schemas and XSLT drive the action.

Calendar Federation and Syndication at UC Berkeley

Jon Udell and others are having a discussion about the sorry state of calendar sharing, both standards activities and clients/platforms (see also Ted Leung and previously Lisa Williams).  The particular discussion is centering around Mozilla and Chandler and how to use WebDAV/CalDAV as a transport for calendar sharing.  But at the end of his first post, Jon writes:

"I wish there were a middle ground between this model and the dedicated
calendar server. Imagine a WebDAV implementation that could map
collections not just to whole-file resources, but to XML elements
within files. Given an XML flavor of the iCalendar format, you could
achieve more finely-granular control over calendar data. But the same
model would work for other applications using other XML formats. And
you'd have the option of searching with XPath or XQuery, again
leveraging infrastructure not bound to any application domain."

He summarizes nicely some of the goals of the Berkeley Campus-Wide Event Calendaring Project, headed up by Allison Bloodworth and others from Berkeley and the CDE.  The project was motivated by the fact that there are something like 75 different calendars at Berkeley, and there's no way to easily share events or create user-friendly views or feeds.  (BTW their work just won the best presentation/paper award at XML 2004 -- kudos!) 

So their focus is to apply Document Engineering techniques to create the XML data model that accomplishes Jon's wishes, and then apply model-based app techniques using XML/XSLT/XSD to create software and glueware to manipulate those events (eg., create calendars).  Borrowing from their XML 2004 presentation, they summarize their solution:

• A standard XML data model of an Event (Scott says: think UBL for events) http://dream.berkeley.edu/EventCalendar/Events.xsd



• A centralized repository of Event information



• A calendar management tool



• Manage events in the repository



• Customize a visually compelling, dynamic web-based calendar



• A design for a system architecture allowing XML feeds to and from the repository for calendars who choose to maintain their own website & repository

They have the XSD schemas and have some software built.  This is important related work if you're interested in calendar sharing and syndication -- check it out.

[UPDATE:] From Adam Rifkin's excellent Microformats post I found hCalendar:

"hCalendar is a 1:1 mapping of iCalendar to semantic XHTML. ...bloggers often discuss events on their blogs -- upcoming events, writeups of past events, etc. With just a tad bit of structure, bloggers can discuss events in their blog(s) in such a way that spiders and other aggregators can retrieve such events, automatically convert them to iCalendar, and use them in any iCalendar application or service."

This Microformat philosphy is pragmatic == I like!.