Subject: Re: Opening times

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 08 Mar 1999 16:38:06 GMT

Since no reply for a week, Ill chip in a bit.  I searched for SKI and 
found it at http://www.medianet.org/ski/eng/ .  Judging from their 
'criteria' page he may be referring to "when registration for IETF 49 
open", "When does the theatre or exhibit at the museum open", etc. but 
that could be wrong.

They list the "When" of an event as:

Singular events - start & end
Repetitive events - time period with exceptions
Opening hours & days

Some distinction between SKI (MuskiNet?) and iCalendar is:

What is it? 

The iCalendar is an ongoing project supported by most of the major players 
in the IT field. The original aim was to facilitate the interchange of 
calendar related data between different programs, operating systems and 
hardware. With out you knowing it several of the programs in your computer 
are iCalendar compliant. 

It is the intention of MusikNet to create a Swedish consensus on what 
steps might be necessary to adapt i Calendar to our specific needs. Our 
initial assumption is that possibly no steps at all need to be taken, but 
we want to discuss this with the broad spectra of producers. 

Why us? 

You might have gathered by now that any time related activity could 
conform itself to iCalendar, which is true, but it would take a great deal 
of effort and considerably more resources than MusikNet and it¹s partners 
are capable of. Therefore it¹s is logical to take this initiative in a 
very homogeneous branch of a very IT savvy country. 

Still, their pages provide no clear distiction between DTSTART and "Doors 
open"/'Registration opens"...  (In iCalendar this could be done by a 
vAlarm for this or a related vEvent w/the relevant DTSTART info).

Bruce
===========================================================================
Bruce Kahn                                INet: [email-masked]
Iris Associates                          Phone: 978.392.5335
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Standard disclaimers apply, even where prohibited by law...

---

From: "Greg FitzPatrick" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Mar 1999 16:52:03 +0100

Sorry to create confusion. I just thought someone might have some
suggestions as to the representation of opening times, or should I have said
business hours.

I try not to bother this list more than possible, since SKI has different
priorities than other members.  And since there is a bit of a rush on.  Even
still some members have been very helpful (specially Frank).

We (the Swedish Calendar Initiative) are using iCal as a vehicle for public
events of a nature wildly outside the original intentions of this workgroup.
The time related functions of the iCal model do very well for us with one
exception and this is - describing the opening hours of a facility such as a
restaurant, golf course, swimming pool, etc.

I could imagine that there is a relation here to free/busy e.g.. the general
opening hours of a resource such as a lecture hall or other venue for a
meeting. I thought someone might have been on to this and could share their
thoughts.  I see two aspects.

1) There is a National/regional aspect.  One would expect that public
holidays should be published somewhere by an authority.  The Organizer 5.1
which many of us are currently playing around with has listing for holidays
in several countries/religions.  Where does that come from?  A lot of
countries declared holidays or should I say days of mourning when King
Hussein died, how are we supposed to know?  Where is the URL?

2) Though one could describe opening hours with the iCal time/date tools
described in the RFC, it gets a little complicated.  We need something like
this;

Start Season
  description of working week in days
	description of opening hours per working day
		description of breaks (such as siesta) within opening hours
			description of qualified opening times (such as the kitchen closes at
22.00)
End Season

Start Season....

Thanks for your suggestion about using vAlarm.  We are divided within SKI
about "bending" iCal.
As we go through the drafts we often see tools which could be altered from
their intended use to suit our specific needs but that could  adventure our
compliance with iCal.  That is why we are using so many X-fields today.

SKI events can be dropped on Outlook or Organizer, which you will see if you
try our demonstration event generator, but as things are today we expect
that we must create our own client viewers.

Greg

Bruce Kahn wrote:

Since no reply for a week, Ill chip in a bit.  I searched for SKI and found
it at http://www.medianet.org/ski/eng/ .  Judging from their 'criteria' page
he may be referring to "when registration for IETF 49 open", "When does the
theatre or exhibit at the museum open", etc. but that could be wrong.

It is the intention of MusikNet to create a Swedish consensus on what steps
might be necessary to adapt i Calendar to our specific needs. Our initial
assumption is that possibly no steps at all need to be taken, but we want to
discuss this with the broad spectra of producers.

Why us?

You might have gathered by now that any time related activity could conform
itself to iCalendar, which is true, but it would take a great deal of effort
and considerably more resources than MusikNet and it¹s partners are capable
of. Therefore it¹s is logical to take this initiative in a very homogeneous
branch of a very IT savvy country.

Still, their pages provide no clear distiction between DTSTART and "Doors
open"/'Registration opens"...  (In iCalendar this could be done by a vAlarm
for this or a related vEvent w/the relevant DTSTART info).

Bruce