Content Model Interoperation Project

What's important right now, in the 0.4/0.5 timeframe, is to put some work into getting a reality check about our content model. We need to validate our work on the content model, and make sure that we're not making any content model decisions that would "paint us into a corner". The content model doesn't have to perfect to start, but we want to make sure that we're on a path towards a design that will enable Chandler to interoperate smoothly with other apps. For the 0.4/0.5 timeframe, the main goals for the import/export project should be to identify problem areas in the content model, and come up with questions and suggestions and open issues about changes or additions we might want to make to the content model in order to interoperate well with other apps.

Eventually, it will be important for Chandler to have full-featured import/export facilities available to the end-user. We're not at that point yet. In time we'll have a real "import/export" project (or a number of projects) that focus on Chandler's interoperability with open standards, other common PIM products, etc.

People

• JeffreyHarris

News

17 November 2004

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I'm trying whip this page into shape. It's not clear to me what our short term goals are in this arena, so input from other folks is very welcome - Jeffrey

Status

Active/0.5 Projects

• ICalendarInteroperationProject

Tasks for 0.5 Release

Feature	Owner	Next Actions	SWAG	Priority	Milestone
Import external events stored is iCalendar files -- see ICalendarInteroperationProject	Jeffrey	see ICalendarInteroperationProject	medium	high	0.5
Export events as iCalendar files -- see ICalendarInteroperationProject	Jeffrey	see ICalendarInteroperationProject	medium	high	0.5

Tasks for later

Feature	Owner	Next Actions	SWAG	Priority	Milestone
Import vCard 2.1 files, create appropriate contacts	Jeffrey	tbd	medium	medium	tbd
Export Contacts as vCards	Jeffrey	tbd	medium	medium	tbd

Pages

• InteroperationExperimentsProposal
• VObject

Historic

Goals

Immediate goals:

• Provide feedback on content model design by putting the content model to work
• Provide feedback on the repository data model
• Get our feet wet with interoperability issues
• Figure out how we can get folks to help us out with interoperability work, in the longer term

Deliverables

• A list of proposed changes to our content model to make it interoperate more smoothly with other PIMs
  • list of new attributes to add to each kind
  • list of new kinds to add
  • list of existing attributes that should change (change might be to data type, cardinality, name, etc.)
• A proposed mapping between all of the attributes in our content model and all of the attributes in the content models of a half dozen other PIMs
  • ideally, these mappings should be represented in some declarative format like parcel.xml, rather than in Python code
  • platforms should probably include
    • Outlook
    • Outlook Express
    • Palm & Palm desktop
    • OS-X Address Book
    • Mozilla Address Book
    • Windows Longhorn
• A collection of sample data sets, harvested from different PIMs
  • one or two sample data sets from each PIM
  • some sample data sets representing "typical" data
  • some sample data sets representing harder use cases that come up with "info-centric" users (e.g. custom address book fields added by Outlook end-users)
  • (might be good to recruit community help for this)
• A "import" parcel in framework.utils that provides a framework for importing data into the repository
  • ideally this parcel would not have hard-coded attribute mappings, but would instead be driven by the "declaritive attribute mapping" info described above
• A proposal for any further work to be done in 0.5

Status

Preliminary proposal: InteroperationExperimentsProposal.

Data formats

• Outlook
• Palm
• RDF (rdf-calendar, foaf)
• iCalendar

Contributors

• BrianDouglasSkinner - 21 Feb 2004 to 27 Feb 2004
• JeffreyHarris - 17 Nov 2004
• HeikkiToivonen

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Comments Welcome

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