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The most common standard for reporting upcoming events over the web.

What are the common methods / official standards for handling events or calendar data?

My use case is that I want to aggregate information about events from several different websites into one calendar or a list of events (this is on the intranet, we have control over all websites). I want to ask websites to submit their data in a specific format so that I can use it.

Things I learned:

  • iCalendar
  • hCalendar (microformat) - embedded in web pages, but then need a web crawler?
  • RSS - there is no clear standard for embedding temporary data (proposal for an event that is still in the "Proposed" status http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/modules/event/ )

Although iCalendar seems to be the most commonly used, I doubt that it is not easy for content creators to submit their data in iCalendar format. I believe hCalendar is becoming useful here.

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icalendar microformats feeds
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4 answers

Present the calendar data as RFC 2445 iCalendar .

Submit an AtomPub RFC 5023 update syndication feed .

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I would recommend publishing the source information using hCalendar. You can then use the parsing library or service to convert from hCalendar to iCalendar (or some other useful format like XML or JSON).

The advantage over publishing iCalendar directly is twofold:

  • You only need to publish one version of your information (only HTML, not HTML and iCalendar).
  • This is easier for your publishers, they just have to make small changes to the HTML used to publish their events, and not to learn a completely new format.

There are various microformat parsers that run as web services or that you can install and run on your servers. There is information about wiki microformats: http://microformats.org/wiki/implementations , http://microformats.org/wiki/parsers .

In particular, you may find X2V useful: http://microformats.org/wiki/implementations#X2V

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Take a look at the Duke University Data Feeds . They provide calendars / events in RSS and custom XML. They also posted sample PHP / JavaScript code to use their feeds. You might want sites on your intranet to provide their feeds in one of these two formats and use something similar to your PHP script example to aggregate feeds.

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I suggest using an Atom feed with XHTML entries containing hCalendar entries.

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