Subject: CAP Requirements?

From: "Greg FitzPatrick" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 1998 11:58:47 +0100

>It would be
>great for CAP to get more feedback from the list on what requirements are
>important (for vendors, corporations, customers, etc.)

You may not be ready for this, but here is what we in Sweden are doing.  The
following is a copy of our abstract submission to the ISOC summit in June,
99.

I have brought this up before - to response of resounding silence.  Any
feedback would be sincerely appreciated.

Track #3 Social impact
	Universal access

S K I - The Swedish Calendar Initiative: Metadata for events.

This paper describes the work and progress of a coordinated effort by
members of the Swedish educational and cultural communities in implementing
Metadata for the publishing of event information on Internet sites.  It is
intended to shed light on the problems and rewards involved in developing
Metadata strategies and hopefully encourage others to follow suite.

Though, at the time of the submission of this abstract, it is too soon to
give a summing up of the effects and results of SKI, the paper given will be
up to date with the situation as of June 1999.

The impetus for SKI comes from the Swedish foundation, MediaNet, who began
work with Dublin Core implementation as part of its efforts within the EU
educational projects - EUC & EUN in 1997.

While attempting to apply Dublin Core markup to an Internet cultural
Almanac, MediaNet became aware of an abundance of sites, all with the
admirable ambition of becoming a centralized, all-encompassing and
trustworthy database for cultural events. Most of these sites were counting
on a large amount of voluntary submissions from producers and organizers to
keep the calendars up to date.

In the absence of one definitive dominating database, an unlikely
development on a free market web in a free market society, the very
proliferation of calendar sites was not only detrimental to each site's
individual success but also confusing and inefficient for the consumer.

MediaNet reasoned that with the use of suitable Metadata tags, the
publishers of event information would never need to go further than their
own home page to make their postings.   Then, data harvesters primed with
the same Metadata format could be easily built to scan these sites, parse
out event information and deliver it to consumers.

We set out to create a consensus amongst the cultural & entertainment
community for the adoption of an event Metadata standard to be called SKI.

Our original intention was to use Dublin Core for this task, but it soon
became apparent that iCalendar (The Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core
Object Specification) being developed within the IETF was a much more
suitable vehicle.

We created a classification scheme for desirable information with the help
of the WH… interrogatives:

What - The Event: name, description, etc.
Who - The organizers, publishers etc. of the event
When - The time
Where - The place
Why - Promotional free text,
Whow - Attendance requirements, status

With very little adjustment and the help of optional X- fields, iCal gave us
an ideal Metadata framework for all this information.

Since Why is to be free text, Whow - itemized free text and When, Where and
Who already well provided for with standards, our main attention turned to
the problem of What.

We looked enviously at the museum sector with their SPECTRE (actually called
SPECTRUM :-)) but we found no existing thesaurus for the categorization of
our events.   We had the choice of creating our own thesaurus, which we knew
would be a tremendously time consuming and weary struggle or come up with an
alternative.

The alternative was to create a living register of the naming conventions
used by each SKI compliant site, open to all.  This causes a bit of
confusion for our target groups - the distinction between being a
centralized database of all events and merely a registry of naming
conventions takes some time to sink in.

After an initial period of intensive lobbying, SKI picked up support from
the Swedish National Education Agency and our efforts are proceeding with
resolute determination.

Greg FitzPatrick
MediaNet/Swedish National Education Agency

---

From: "Mark D. Anderson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 1998 09:03:52 -0800

Is there a URL for info that explains this SKI project in greater
detail (the exact data model; any protocol in use; etc.)?

-mda