Today was consumed with what is either standards minutia or very big stuff. I am too tired to write of anything else, so let me explain what’s afoot.
Scheduling
Building system schedules today are too involved, and require too much process information. If I want to meet at 9:30 tomorrow morning, I want the room air-conditioned and ready to go by 9:30. I don’t want to learn about heat times, cool times, warm-up times. Be ready. By 9:30.
The enterprise standard for scheduling was developed years ago for use in email and its name is vCalendar or vCal. vCAL can not only schedule that meeting tomorrow, but can schedule it every two weeks, or on the second Thursday of every month, or even every two weeks except in a month that has three Tuesdays. vCAL has all the flexibility one could want.
vCAL was refreshed for internet transmission and stand-alone download into the internet calendar standard, or iCalendar. When you book airline tickets and it says “click here to add to your calendar”, you are using iCalendar. Apple muddied the water by writing the program iCal to use ICAL, but it us really the stand-alone version of vCal.
In early 2001, an attempt was begun to define iCalendar in XML, xCalender. As far as I can tell this project stalled out in 2002. oBIX has been meeting for some months to integrate xCal into scheduling system scheduling.
Today, I received the suggestion that I look at hCAL instead. hCalendar (short for HTML iCalendar) is a Microformat standard for displaying a semantic (X)HTML representation of iCalendar-format calendar information about an event. hCAL is designed for display, but it has a socket in which to nestle additional XML information. This seems nicely pre-adapted for oBIX, as well as DR (demand response) events. hCal was designed to allow parsing tools to extract the details of the event, and display them using some other website, index or search them, or to load them into a calendar or diary program.
Today, I am trying to get oBIX to make decisions as to how to use viCal, to share that decision with OpenADR, and to move on.