Metadata : Proposed calendar server extensions could help calendaring software. From the XML Cover Pages, it looks like there might be some new extensions to help further the use of standardized approaches to using calendaring software (like calendar apps included in OnTime, Groupwise, Outlook, Exchange, Mozilla, iCal, Evolution, etc.

Most older and well-established calendaring tools that possess the ability to share calendaring data amongst workgroups have stored them in a proprietary manner, which is understandable due to the fact that there were no real standards to manage calendars. This wasn't a big problem, unless you needed to share your calendars across computers, networks, or devices (PDAs, office computers, home computers, etc.). Using an open standard called WebDAV, which allows for remote authoring and publication of materials to be distributed over the web, apps like iCal for Mac OS X and Mozilla started using the webcal ICS format for calendar exchanging.

Because of these open standards, and the growing number of extensions for calendaring and remote authoring, it's now possible to break free from proprietary methods and packages. It would be really nice if tools like Outlook, Exchange, Groupwise, OnTime, etc., could publish or even share data with these newer standards without having to manually import a file (much less something proprietary or dumbed-down like HTML). That way users could use any sort of mail client they like, and have instant integration into a shared/networked calendaring system based on open standards without the proprietary expense price tag.

These newer standards are very interesting and easy to maintain, and should really help further open calendaring. Even better, most are based on XML. They allow for security and authorization (also built into the server-side software), private views, etc., all with freely available (often open source) tools. For someone who uses a Mac (at home) and both Windows and Linux (at work), it would be nice to be able to use one server-based calendar file and a myriad of different calendaring clients on my various environments than to maintain (or "hot sync") many iterations of the same data.

[inSilico - A Princeton University Library metadata and digital library blog]  6:18:36 AM   [Feedback ]