subscribing to RSS-Event feeds

[Scott Raymond]

There's a feature I've yet to see in any calendar client that, I think,
would be extremely useful and not too hard to implement.

Calendar could provide an interface for the user to enter one or more URLs
of files that use the Event module of RSS [1]. This is an extremely simple
format for syndicating event data-- I think its simplicity is its major
strength, because webmasters will be able to start publishing their event
data immediately, which is one of the main reasons RSS has gained so much
traction for headline syndication.

Once a user entered any RSS URLs, Calendar would periodically download the
data and display the events along with "regular" events. If data is
added/deleted/changed on the remote RSS file, those changes are updated on
the client site the next time the file is checked.

This solution certainly doesn't address every situation one could imagine.
But it does covers a huge class of needs, and it keeps the whole process
simple enough for it to actually get widely implemented. Local newspapers
already maintain databases of local events that could easily be formatted as
RSS Event feeds; you could subscribe to the concert schedules of your
favorite bands or clubs; O'Reilly publishes their conference schedule in
RSS-Event format; etc.

What do you think? Am I overlooking any particular difficulties in
implementation?

Best,
:sco

[1]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-dev/files/Modules/Proposed/mod_event.html

[Libby Miller]

Hi,

I'm the Taskforce leader for the RDF Interest group's calendaring
taskforce, and I've just implemented something that kinda does the
RSS+events download and display, before realizing that Mozilla's
calendar could do it better and joining this list.

Taskforce page/list

http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/2001/04/calendar/
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-calendar/

Among other things we've been working on an RDF schema for iCalendar

http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/discovery/2001/06/schemas/ical-full/hybrid.rdf

but recently I've started to think that RSS+events is sufficient for
many things

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-rdf-calendar/2002May/0000.html

I've hacked together a simple server which downloads and merges RSS
events files, including decrypting encrypted ones. I really think that
this is a very interesting and useful approach, and it would be
fantastic if Mozilla had an implementation of it.

Here's a demo (there are some sample feeds at the bottom if you want to
use them):

http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe/events/view/

and a quick writeup and some very experimental java code

http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/rdfquery/downloads.html#rdfcal
http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/rdfquery/rdfcal.tar.gz

and yes, it easy to implement - I used my RDF query tools, but you guys
have all the infrastructure already I think.

You are right about the simplicity of RSS+events being important too -
most people won't create very complex data but (a few) people are
creating RSS+events data. We've been using it to manage events and
deliverables in our EC project, SWAD-Europe.

There's a fair bit of interesting related work going on as well (e.g.
Dan Connolly's Palm/RDF work), not all of it on the list but some on
the RDF interest group irc channel (irc:irc.openprojects.net#rdfig)

I hope this encourages you to go down this route - I'd like to help if i
can (though this probably doesn't extend to coding since I don't have
the experience).

cheers,

Libby Miller