Cover Pages news story for WS-Calendar TC

[Robin Cover <robin@oasis-open.org>]

FYI:

"OASIS Web Services Calendar (WS-Calendar) TC to Create Common Scheduling Standard"
http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2010-02-08-a.html
http://xml.coverpages.org/newsletter/news2010-02-08.html#cp1

If anyone has comments (errors, additions, other corrections),
please send me offline email at: robin@oasis-open.org

I'll do my best to provide improvements per your feedback.

Best wishes for success in this new technical activity.

Cheers,

  - Robin

Here's the excerpt:

========================================================================

OASIS has announced the formation of a new Web Services Calendar
(WS-Calendar) Technical Committee, chartered to adapt existing calendaring
and scheduling specifications toward development of a "Common Scheduling"
standard to define how schedule and event information is passed between
and within services. The committee will deliver a specification for
creating, retrieving, updating, and deleting calendar events on a
schedule. This includes a standard schema and semantics for schedule
and interval information for use in other web services.

While the initial motivation for WS-Calendar work came from the smart
grid domain (schedule and interval for energy transmission and payments),
the TC proposers feel that a common scheduling specification for web
services would be applicable to a wide range of industry requirements
where transactions and business processes depend critically upon
scheduling. Time synchronization, schedule alignment, and performance
alignment are nearly universal business process concerns, as described
in the WS-Calendar TC Charter...

The WS-Calendar TC will start work with the canonical XML serialization
of the updated iCalendar specification (IETF RFC 5545, Internet
Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification -- iCalendar),
currently published as a IETF Standards Track Internet Draft: "iCalendar
XML Representation".  CalConnect plans to contribute this canonical XML
serialization iCalendar document to the WS-Calendar TC. The iCalendar
XML draft is being developed by the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium
(CalConnect) XML Technical Committee (TC-XML) and reviewed in IETF...
The WS-Calendar TC Charter notes that definitive work on schedule and
interval is found in the IETF standards iCalendar, iTIP, and iMIP.
Updated versions of those standards are being produced for extensibility
by the Calendar and Scheduling Consortium, with review and publication
in IETF.

Several previous technical activities have focused upon development of
markup-language formalisms to represent iCalendar information, including:
(1) RDF Calendar: An Application of the Resource Description Framework
to iCalendar Data; (2) iCalendar in XML Format (xCal-Basic); (3) Guideline
for Use of XML with iCalendar Elements; (4) iCalendar DTD Document (xCal);
(5) The iCalendar DTD Document; (6) The iCalendar XML DTD. Principals
in the iCalendar XML Representation work feel that critical mass may now
have been reached such that developers of calendaring and scheduling
applications will now recognize the benefits of standardized XML format
and support adoption of the CalConnect/IETF specification. The ongoing
effort toward standardization of an iCalendar XML Representation takes
cognizance of the vCard XML Schema specification being developed within
the IETF vCard and CardDAV (VCARDDAV) Working Group. Participants in
the CalConnect and IETF working parties sense that benefits will come
from alignment of the two XML representation formats, particularly with
respect to extensibility mechanisms.

-- 

Robin Cover
OASIS, Director of Information Services
Editor, Cover Pages and XML Daily Newslink
Email: robin@oasis-open.org
Staff bio: http://www.oasis-open.org/who/staff.php#cover
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