Vision for Regional Events Calendaring on the Web

Executive Summary

This paper discusses the publishing and reading of calendar event items using syndication.
Much of the technology has already been developed. In fact, a great deal of thought has been put in the issue in various web forums.

The creation of the tools to solve these problems is beyond the budgets of most local non-profits, but could either be shared, or developed by a central entity.

The Problem

Tourist organizations, non-profits, and even businesses frequently have a difficult time being able to consolidate event calendaring for regions and similar event types. People interested in events in a region often experience difficulty in finding events, and often have to visit several websites.

In some cases, organizations have their own web-based calendar. A few community calendars exist that aggregate the various events, but the maintenance of calendars is typically done manually.

This paper provides a solution plan that would create better regional and organizational event and calendar communications. A great deal of the discussion here is technical in nature, as it does rely on a technical solution.

Many different software solutions exist that address calendaring, including XML standards, and RSS feeds for calendar items. What has not been developed is an easy system for organizations to publish calendar events simultaneously to their own websites, while making some events available to other organizations calendars.

The Solution

Whatever solution is implemented must address several different factors in order to be successful.

Simplicity to implement
The solution must be simple to implement. Users on the organizational level must be able to publish calendar items in the most simple manner possible.
Usefulness
End users, or the public that is searching for event information must be able to view the information easily, and filter it to their specific needs.
Non-platform-specific
The technologies used must span many different types of platforms (UNIX, Windows, etc.)

The solution to this problem would need to address both the cultural aspect of online calendars and the technical challenges inherent in an attempt to get many different people on many different systems to share information.

Figure 1 - overall schema

Administrative Tools – provide organizations with the tools to input events into their calendar. Administrators would be able to mark events as “private”, meaning the events could not be shared to outside calendars, and “public”, meaning that outside calendars could incorporate these events. When an administrator adds an event to the calendar, the event information would be published to an XML on their website.

There are tools that exist on the web to create these files, but they do not have a built-in tool to publish the XML file to their own website.

Central Calendar Directory
This would be a publicly available website, where organizations would list the location of their XML files, and the type and location of organization.

Website Calendars
In effect, what is needed is a type of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) aggregator of calendar feeds. There is already at least one such tool available, but it doesn’t provide the type of calendar displays that many organizations require, nor an easy method of pushing content to a centralized document.

Proposal

It is proposed that a web calendar viewer be developed that would fit the following requirements:

Ability to pull calendar information from multiple XML documents
Be easily administered, wherein the admin can designate which feeds to use
That the admin be able to apply filters (for example; show only items that are in the “music” category”
That the admin have the option of which type of calendars to show

The calendar grid (calendar events listed in the grid itself)
Calendar List (a single list with Months as headers, and items listed beneath the appropriate month)
Calendar Navigation to time period pages (the calendar is a navigation device to get to Calendar list pages)

That calendar displays would be created using CSS so that website owners would be able to easily edit the look and feel of the calendar.
Calendar items would be comprised of a Title, date and time (optionally a time span), brief description, recurrence, and link to more information in a new window.

The costs of creating this solution

The costs of creating this solution would require:

The creation of the admin tools to be provided to organizations. This tool could be a web-based tool that resides on the central server, a desk-top application, or a tool developed for both UNIX and Windows web servers.
The Calendar display modules would need to be programmed to be usable on at least UNIX and Windows. If budget is a prime consideration, I would recommend that a UNIX version (probably PHP) be developed first as most organizations have websites hosted on UNIX. Another possible solution is to develop the calendars to be pushed from the central website and be displayable using iFrames. The differences in cost need to be investigated further.
The development of the central website where organizations would be able to locate other organization calendars to subscribe to.

Ongoing costs for the system would be minimal. As technologies change, the tools may need to be redeveloped over time to be usable on new operating systems and platforms.

Relevant Documents:

Guide to Internet Calendaring

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3283.txt
The Internet Society (2002).