[Robotgroup] Fwd: [fai] Forum for AI, Monday, August 25, Alexander Koller, Saarland University (at UT)

[Bryan Bishop]

On Monday 18 August 2008, Andre Lamothe wrote:
> Looks like its working now, so I put an "Upcoming and Passed Events"
> section, then on each line, when, what, where, link seperated by | as
> a convention.

Awesome! Thanks. I'll have to go through my backlog of email and throw 
in some of the events I've forgotten too.

I'm thinking of doing something a bit different. I noticed that there 
are, in fact, other websites with calendars for the Austin area, but 
it's not computationally tractable. So let's just formalize this a bit. 
Raw organic natural language content on the wiki is ok since the 
majority of people will be adding that anyway, but let's also try out a 
formal file format to represent calendar events.

I'm thinking of doing it in YAML since it makes it ridiculously easy to 
write:

http://yaml.org/
http://pyyaml.org/
http://pyyaml.org/wiki/PyYAMLDocumentation

So an example event file (MakerFaire2008.evt):

!!python/object:__main__.Event
name: Maker Faire 2008
location: Austin Convention Center, 900 Barton Springs Rd, Austin, TX 
78704
start: 2008-10-18 10am
end: 2008-10-18 10pm
trackback: http://austinbrains.org/makerfaire2008.trc

I haven't crystallized this in stone yet, but the basic idea is that 
this can easily be converted into formats for calendar software so that 
people can use their own already-made calendars. The idea of the 
trackback is to let the coordinator get a feel for how many people 
might attend, as well as for users to get more information about what 
we know of the event - maybe get further instructions, a good link or 
two, whatever. I'll have to sit and think about this some more. Since 
it's easy to write, and it's easy to make a script to generate these 
types of files, the only thing left is making the calendar interfaces 
to things like Google Calendar and iCal etc.

- Bryan
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