Subject: WG Review: JSON data formats for vCard and iCalendar (jcardcal)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2013 11:35:16 -0800

A new IETF working group has been proposed in the Applications Area. The
IESG has not made any determination yet. The following draft charter was
submitted, and is provided for informational purposes only. Please send
your comments to the IESG mailing list (iesg at ietf.org) by 2013-02-28.

JSON data formats for vCard and iCalendar (jcardcal)
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Current Status: Proposed Working Group

Assigned Area Director:
  Pete Resnick <[email-masked]>

Charter of Working Group:

jcardcal Working Group - JSON data formats for iCalendar and vCard.

Problem Statement:

The standard iCalendar [RFC5545] and vCard [RFC6350] data formats are in
widespread use for calendaring and contacts data exchange. In addition
to the text formats described in the base specifications, alternative
XML formats have been defined ([RFC6321] and [RFC6351] respectively).
Interest has been expressed in also having JSON [RFC4627] formats for
both iCalendar and vCard to allow easier integration of such data with
web or other Javascript based applications, and other JSON-based
protocols being developed by IETF working groups such as jose, scim, and
weirds.

Because iCalendar and vCard formats have a similar schema (a
component/property/parameter/value model) it is often the case that
iCalendar and vCard data handling is carried out by libraries with a
high degree of code re-use for each format. It is thus highly desirable
that the JSON formats for iCalendar and vCard are aligned in terms of
their JSON structures so that the policy of code re-use for
iCalendar/vCard parsing/generation can continue.

Objectives:

The jcardcal working group is chartered to develop JSON-based data
formats that are accurate, straightforward representations of iCalendar
and vCard data, allowing for conversion between any of the various
equivalent data formats without any loss of semantic meaning, and
maximal interoperability.

Consideration will be given to compactness and readability of the JSON
data formats, whilst at the same time maintaining the underlying data
models of the respective original formats. The JSON formats will re-use
the extensibility model of the base formats. The JSON formats will use
similar data models in JSON to allow for optimal code re-use when
parsing/generating jCard and jCal.

Syntactic requirements from other working groups looking to adopt
the jCard or jCal data formats will be considered. However, changes
to the semantics of vCard and iCalendar are out of scope.
Requirements that are not explicitly mentioned in this charter will
be considered so long as they do not conflict with the other stated
objectives. Specific requirements for consideration are:

 * a need for conveying unstructured address information (weirds WG).

Milestones:

  Mar 2013 - Determine initial requirements of other Working Groups.
  Mar 2013 - Accept jCard and jCal documents as Working Group items.
  May 2013 - Request publication of jCard document.
  Jun 2013 - Request publication of jCal document.