This can all get very complex, do you have a glossary?

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GLOSSARY OF CALENDARING AND SCHEDULING TERMS

Access control - A mechanism to grant or deny privileges (Create, Read, Update, Delete) on calendars,

events, tasks or journal entries to other calendar users.

 

Access Control List – A set or list of privileges, granted or denied to other calendar users, that define

access control to a particular calendar, event, task or journal entry.

 

Alarm - A reminder notification for an event or a task. An example, alarms, may be used to define a

reminder for a pending event or an overdue task. Times may be relative or predetermined.

 

Attendee – Participant of a calendar event or task. A participant can be the chair of a calendar event or

task. That person’s participation may be required or optional.

 

CalDAV - A standard protocol to allow calendaring and scheduling via extensions to the WebDAV

protocol. Defined by two specifications, the first specifies a calendar access protocol that allows Calendar

User Agents to access and manage calendar data in a calendar store accessible via a calendar service.

 

The second specification defines how Calendar User Agents perform scheduling operations via a

calendar service. The two drafts for these protocols can be found at http://ietf.osafoundation.org/caldav/.

 

Calendar - A collection of events, tasks, journal entries, etc. Examples include a person's or group's

schedule, resource availability, and event listings.

 

Calendar Access Rights - A set of rules defining who may perform what operations, such as reading or

writing information, on a given calendar. [Reference: RFC 3283] See also Access Control List.

 

Calendar Object – A collection of components containing calendaring and scheduling information.

 

Calendar Service - A server application that provides calendar user agents access to calendar stores.

 

Calendar Store (CS) - A data repository that may contain several calendars as well as properties and

components of those calendars.

 

Calendar User (CU) - A person that accesses their calendar information.

 

Calendar User Agent (CUA) - 1) Software with which the calendar user communicates with a calendar

service or local calendar store to access calendar information. 2) Software that gathers calendar data on

the Calendar User's behalf.

 

CalConnect – The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium consisting of vendors and user groups

interested in promoting and improving calendaring and scheduling standards and interoperability.

 

Component - A piece of calendar data such as an event, a task or an alarm. Information about

components is stored as properties of those components. [Reference: RFC 3283]

 

Counter – A counter-proposal sent by a participant to an event or task organizer to suggest a change to

the event or task such as the scheduled date/time, list of participants, etc.

 

Daylight Saving Time (DST) – The period of the year in which the local time is adjusted forward, most

commonly by one hour.

 

Delegate - A calendar user who has been assigned to participate in an event or task in place of one of the

attendees in that event or task. An example of a delegate is a team member sent to a particular meeting

as a substitute for one of his or her colleagues.

 

Delegator - A calendar user who has assigned his or her participation in an event or task to another

calendar user. An example of a delegator is a busy executive who sends an employee to a meeting in his

or her place.

 

Designate - A calendar user authorized to act on behalf of another calendar user. An example of a

designate is an assistant who schedules meetings for his or her superior.

 

Event – A calendar object that is commonly used to represent things that mark time or use time.

 

Examples include meetings, appointments, anniversaries, start times, arrival times, closing times.

 

Freebusy – A list of free and busy periods for a particular calendar user or resource. Primarily used for

scheduling resources or meetings with other people. Time periods may be marked as busy, free, busyunavailable

(sometimes referred to as out of office) and busy-tentative.

 

iCal - The name of Apple Computer, Inc's calendar client. Often used as the abbreviation of the iCalendar

standard.

 

iCalendar – The Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification. An IETF standard (RFC

2445) for a text representation of calendar data. Scheduling operations are specified in RFC 2446.

 

IETF (The Internet Engineering Task Force) – An International community organization that develops and

maintains the architecture of the worldwide Internet. The IETF issues standards known as RFCs (Request

For Comments), several of which pertain to calendaring and scheduling.

 

Instance – A single occurrence in a recurring event.

 

iMIP (iCalendar Message-Based Interoperability Protocol) – An IETF standard (RFC 2447) for

encapsulating iCalendar data in email messages.

 

Invite – A request to attend a calendar event sent as structured iCalendar data. Invitations can be used to

schedule both calendar users and resources.

 

Journal entry – A note associated with a date stored with other iCalendar data, e.g. a call log.

Local Calendar Store – A calendar store (CS) that is on the same device as the calendar user agent

(CUA). [Reference: RFC 3283]

 

MIME - An acronym for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, a specification for formatting non-ASCII

messages, including iCalendar data, graphics, audio and video, so that they can be sent over the

Internet. MIME is supported by email clients and web browsers.

 

Negotiation - see Scheduling

 

Notification - An alert sent to a calendar user. Examples include alerts for new calendar items, changes to

existing items, or reminders about existing items. Notification methods include: sound from the computer,

visual feedback on the computer, email, paging, voicemail and telephone call.

 

Organizer – A calendar user who creates a calendar item.

 

Priority – A level of importance and/or urgency calendar users can apply to Tasks and Events.

 

Property - A description of some element of a component, such as a start time, title or location. Properties

can have parameters associated with them to modify or add to their meaning.

 

Publish – To make calendar information, such as freebusy time, available to a select group or to the

public.

 

Recurring – An event or task that happens more than once either with a regular interval (ex. daily, weekly,

monthly) that can be expressed by a rule or with an explicit series of dates/times.

 

Reminder - See Notification.

 

Remote Store - A calendar store that is not on the same machine/device as the calendar user agent

Repeating – See Recurring.

 

Resource - Shared equipment, materials, or facilities that can scheduled for use by calendar users.

Examples include: conference rooms, computers, audio visual equipment, and vehicles.

 

RFC (Request for comments) – IETF and other standards bodies use RFCs to define Internet standards.

They document most of the protocols, mechanisms, procedures and best practices in use on the

Internet.

 

RSVP – A request for status updates sent by the organizer for event invitations or tasks.

Schedule – See Calendar.

 

Scheduling – The exchange of request/invitations and responses between organizers and attendees of

scheduled events, tasks or journal entries.

 

Standard Time – Originally developed as a consistent time system for the railroads using Greenwich

Mean Time (GMT) (see UTC below). Time zones (see below) and DST shifts are based upon standard

time.

 

Task – A calendar object that is commonly used to represent work items.

 

Text/calendar – The MIME content type for encoding iCalendar objects. Example usage includes: email,

web pages.

 

Time zone - Areas of the Earth that have adopted the same local time. Time zones are generally centered

on meridians of a longitude, that is a multiple of 15°, thus making neighboring time zones one hour apart.

 

However, the one hour separation is not universal and the shapes of time zones can be quite irregular

because they usually follow the boundaries of states, countries or other administrative areas. Time zones

are calendar components that define the time of an event relative to UTC (see below).

 

To-do – See Task.

 

Transparency – A property of an event that defines whether it will appear free or busy in free/busy time

searches.

 

UTC - Coordinated Universal Time, abbreviated UTC. Also Zulu Time (alphabetized listing of time zones).

 

UTC is designated to be at zero longitude, also Greenwich mean time (GMT). Is the basis for all local time

offsets. Offsets are either postive or negative. An example is UTC-8 (Pacific Standard Time).

Some iCalendar examples:

DTSTART:19970714T133000 ;Local time

DTSTART:19970714T173000Z ;UTC time

DTSTART;TZID=US-Eastern:19970714T133000 ;Local time and time zone reference

vCalendar – A text representation of calendar and scheduling data created by the Versit consortium. The

iCalendar specification is based on the work of vCalendar.

 

xCal - Representing calendar data in XML which corresponds closely to the iCalendar standard. There is

no current standard.

 

References

CalDAV – http://ietf.osafoundation.org/caldav/

IETF – http://www.ietf.org

RFCs - http://www.ietf.org/rfc.html