On 19/11/2014 10:40, Nick Poole wrote:
> There's no way of automating the aggregation of this information at the moment. Everyone uses different formats, data structures etc and there's very little machine-readable stuff on museum events that we've been able to find.
One approach which we are trying here in Mid Sussex uses the popular
Google calendar format [1]. I give participating music groups write
access to a shared Google calendar, and they put their own concerts up,
using the fields provided (which admittedly aren't ideal, but hey).
Each group pastes code into its own site somewhere (e.g. [2]) to
transclude the calendar, so we are cross-publicising each others'
concerts. Each instance of the calendar is always up to date (unlike
the printed brochures we used to produce).
Then members of the music-loving public can choose to include the
calendar in their own Google calendar framework. If they do, they get
reminders about each concert a couple of weeks before it happens. At
which point it becomes much more useful than a web page which you have
to remember to go and look at.
I haven't explored the idea of exporting the calendar as ICal and
loading it into a combined events calendar, but if it worked that would
give us syndication, if only in "batch mode".
Richard
[1] http://www.midsussexconcerts.org.uk/
[2] http://www.burgesshillchoralsociety.org.uk/concerts-in-mid-sussex.html
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*Richard Light*
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