1.  Glossary of Calendaring and Scheduling Terms

For the purposes of this document, the following terms and definitions apply.

1.1. Access control

A mechanism to grant or deny privileges (Create, Read, Update, Delete) on calendars, events, tasks or journal entries to other calendar users.

1.2. 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.

1.3. 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.

1.4. 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.

1.5. 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/.

1.6. Calendar

A collection of events, tasks, journal entries, etc. Examples include a person’s or group’s schedule, resource availability, and event listings.

1.7. Calendar Access Rights

A set of rules defining who may perform what operations, such as reading or writing information, on a given calendar. See also Access Control List (Clause 1.2).

[SOURCE: IETF RFC 3283]

1.8. Calendar Object

A collection of components containing calendaring and scheduling information.

1.9. Calendar Service

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

1.10. Calendar Store (CS)

A data repository that may contain several calendars as well as properties and components of those calendars.

1.11. Calendar User (CU)

A person that accesses their calendar information.

1.12. Calendar User Agent (CUA)

1.13. CalConnect

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium consisting of vendors and user groups interested in promoting and improving calendaring and scheduling standards and interoperability.

1.14. 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.

[SOURCE: IETF RFC 3283]

1.15. 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.

1.16. Daylight Saving Time (DST)

The period of the year in which the local time is adjusted forward, most commonly by one hour.

1.17. 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.

1.18. 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.

1.19. 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.

1.20. 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.

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

1.22. iCal

The name of Apple Computer, Inc’s calendar client. Often used as the abbreviation of the iCalendar standard.

1.23. 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.

1.24. 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.

1.25. Instance

A single occurrence in a recurring event.

1.26. iMIP (iCalendar Message-Based Interoperability Protocol)

An IETF standard (RFC 2447) for encapsulating iCalendar data in email messages.

1.27. Invite

A request to attend a calendar event sent as structured iCalendar data. Invitations can be used to schedule both calendar users and resources.

1.28. Journal entry

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

1.29. Local Calendar Store

A calendar store (CS) that is on the same device as the calendar user agent (CUA).

[SOURCE: IETF RFC 3283]

1.30. 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.

1.31. Negotiation

Dee Scheduling (Clause 1.45)

1.32. 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.

1.33. Organizer

A calendar user who creates a calendar item.

1.34. Priority

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

1.35. 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.

1.36. Publish

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

1.37. 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.

1.38. Reminder

See Notification (Clause 1.32).

1.39. Remote Store

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

1.40. Repeating

See Recurring (Clause 1.37).

1.41. Resource

Shared equipment, materials, or facilities that can scheduled for use by calendar users. Examples include: conference rooms, computers, audio visual equipment, and vehicles.

1.42. 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.

1.43. RSVP

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

1.44. Schedule

See Calendar (Clause 1.6).

1.45. Scheduling

The exchange of request/invitations and responses between organizers and attendees of scheduled events, tasks or journal entries.

1.46. Standard Time

Originally developed as a consistent time system for the railroads using Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) (see UTC (Clause 1.52) below). Time zones (Clause 1.49) (see below) and DST shifts are based upon standard time.

1.47. Task

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

1.48. Text/calendar

The MIME content type for encoding iCalendar objects. Example usage includes: email, web pages.

1.49. 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 (Clause 1.52) (see below).

1.50. To-do

See Task (Clause 1.47).

1.51. Transparency

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

1.52. 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 positive or negative. An example is UTC-8 (Pacific Standard Time).

Some iCalendar examples:

1.53. vCalendar

A text representation of calendar and scheduling data created by the Versit consortium. The iCalendar specification is based on the work of vCalendar.

1.54. xCal

Representing calendar data in XML which corresponds closely to the iCalendar standard. There is no current standard.

Bibliography

[1]  CalDAV — http://ietf.osafoundation.org/caldav/

[2]  IETF — http://www.ietf.org

[3]  RFCs — http://www.ietf.org/rfc.html

[4]  IETF RFC 3283, B. MAHONEY, G. BABICS and A. TALER. Guide to Internet Calendaring. 2002. RFC Publisher. https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3283.