Accurate location information is a "must have" requirement

[Skip Montanaro <skip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As the developer of a "calendar/schedule enabled application" I'd like to
chip in one thing Bob Tatar and I brought up at the meeting that appears to
be missing from the meeting minutes.

There is a lot of attention paid to meeting times, but virtually no
discussion of accurate location information.  Bill Spencer treated timezones
pretty carefully in the SWTP spec, and with recurring dates and all, it's
pretty clear that they need to be carefully considered.  However the only
real location tags I remember seeing are the LOCATION properties in SSTP and
SWTP (both free-format text fields) and the GEO field in vCalendar (which
takes a lat/long tuple).

Neither of these is adequate for a number of reasons:

    1. Lat/long information isn't enough to infer timezones because people
    at various places in the world have adopted different ideas about the
    correct relationship between the Earth's lines of longitude and the
    clock on the wall.  Simply put, there are some pretty daft people out
    there pushing the boundaries around.  (Take a look at the world map in
    the front of your handy-dandy "Rand McNally Comprehensive World Atlas"
    if you think I'm kidding.)

    2. Many applications that will want to interface to calendar systems
    (like our event calendars, Musi-Cal and the Internet Conference
    Calendar) will place as much emphasis on location as time.  It would be
    a shame to think that that basic events could only travel one way
    (toward calendar systems) because loss of information prevents it going
    the other direction.

    3. People will think up all sorts of different ways to enter information
    in free-format location fields so people trying to parse them will
    invariably run into snags.  (Believe me, I squeek from experience.)

    4. There seems to be an implicit assumption that events are entered
    one-by-one.  We get information in huge batches sometimes, often with
    varying degrees of consistency.  I have never seen concert or conference
    listings that indicated timezones.  Most listings don't even give event
    times.  It's impossible in most cases to add timezone information
    manually because of the sheer volume of data we deal with, and for most
    purposes it's pretty irrelevant.  Inferring it from accurate
    city/region/country information is the only chance of being able to feed
    it to calendar software.

    5. Finally, event location will take on greater and greater importance
    as scheduling reaches out beyond small groups to encompass organizations
    that are geographically dispersed.  No longer will it be sufficient to
    indicate "Mozilla Room" as the sole indicator of a meeting's location.
    If I add a conference in Miami, Florida to my scheduler it's not too
    wacky to think it should automatically add a to-do for two weeks prior
    to the conference as a reminder to book my super-saver tickets.

I welcome comments on this.

Skip Montanaro     | Check out:
skip@calendar.com  |   Musi-Cal: http://concerts.calendar.com/
(518)372-5583      |   Conference Calendar: http://conferences.calendar.com/