Subject: Proposal for VFREEBUSY in icalendar rfc 2445

From: Ian Woollard <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 25 Jul 1999 15:25:11 +0100

I've been looking at the icalendar standard. The standard seems very
well thought out, but I'm deliberately poking in corners to
see what might be missed, and to see if I can understand it better.

There are 3 independent questions I have about freebusy:

1. priority- should the free busy include priority
2. quantity- should free busy specify quantity rather than
boolean free/busy
3. event- should free busy refer back to the event that
uses it up?

For example, when I schedule my time, I effectively schedule my time for
several months at a time, so that it would appear that I am 100%
occupied.

However, for many items moving the work aside is pretty easily done.
So it seems to me that the standard needs to have some way to describe
how
important a freebusy period is.

Another point is that it might be a good idea to specify how much
of a thing/person is used, not just a boolean in use/free. For example,
some people like to allocate 30% of their time to a particular
person. Or there may be a number of equivalent seats in a room
that can be allocated. Can free/busy be used to plan their use?

Finally, I think that the freebusy should be correlateable back to
the event that causes its usage...

So, perhaps fbvalue could be changed like:

fbvalue    = usageperiod *["," usageperiod]

usageperiod = ( ":UID=" uid ":" )
                       ; quantities value may be postitive or negative
                       ( ":QUANTITY=" integer ( "." integer))
                       ( ":" priority )
                       period

The addition of QUANTITY allows the specification of usage of
resources such as money, or other identical or equivalent items- if
quantity is not present this is equal to a quantity of 1. CUAs
that cannot handle other than unity quantities properly would
consider them to be busy if they were not totally free.

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From: Ian Woollard <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 25 Jul 1999 15:25:11 +0100

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