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| Event Description Standardization |
| Posted by wsjordan(Admin) on September 04, 2007 7:17 PM |
So there are a number of standards out there for describing events (iCal, Google Calendar, etc.), but they are mostly made for managing personal calendars and none of them are quite as descriptive as they really should to be for public events, nor do they provide for easy distribution of event information between systems. I certainly wouldn't say that the UnderTheGrid format is anywhere near being ideal either, but I sure would like it to be. Before we can start moving it toward being ideal, though, we need to define what “ideal” is.
The things I think a standard should have are:
- Basic event description fields (Name, location info, description), with no hard length limitations, but recommended limitations.
- Unlimited date description fields
- Unlimited price description fields
- Some sort of tracking, so that an event can be distributed across multiple systems without risk of duplication
- Extensibility. There will always be specialized fields for various event types. An ideal standard should allow users to add and use these fields on their own system without having to rewrite the entire standard.
The questions I want to throw out there are:
1. What should the basic description fields cover? Is name, location, description enough?
2. Are there location fields besides venue, address, city, state, postal code, country that should be included?
3. Should there be some sort of appropriateness/restriction fields be included, such as age restrictions?
4. For tracking, is there a logical way to uniquely tag an event without requiring a central database? Do we require a central database? Part of the “standard” could be that the user has to pull a unique ID from a central server before they can send the info to other servers.
5. And of course the big question is, what else am I missing?
I am very open to suggestions at this point. We have a system that works for UtG for now, but as new UtG sites pop up and the UtG network gets added into other systems, I would like for our format to become more robust and, dream of dreams, maybe become “the standard”.
-wsjordan |
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