EventFinder Markup Language Home Page

Mike Schuh's EventFinder Markup Language Home Page

The EventFinder Markup Language is an XML compliant language intended to facilitate the distribution of information about particpatory events. It includes markup constructs for events, the venues where they are held, and other supporting data.

This is the "official" home page of the EventFinder Markup Language project.

I am reorganizing how I do and present this effort. My previous work on this project (which I started in 1999) is at www.farmdale.com/ef/welcome.shtml.

Jump to: The Current Situation | Why The Status Quo Fails | Technical Overview | How You Can Participate | Tools

The Concept

The EventFinder Markup Language is a means to distribute information about events - folk dances, orienteering meets, etc., via the web. The broad idea is that a user, attempting to locate, for example, dance opportunities in a region can formulate a query based on what kind of event (dance), where it takes place (a city), and when (a date or range of dates), and submit this query to an EventFinder site instead of searching through numerous web pages. The event organizers will create a single web page with EFML data about their event. They might, optionally, forward the location of their EFML page to an EventFinder host (but they will need to do this at most once). They will not need to forward the information (nor any corrections!) to several web page hosts. Hosts of EventFinder sites will not need to manually collect and edit data from event organizers. Instead, they can "crawl" (search) through known EFML source pages and collect the information from them. If this is done on a regular (daily? hourly?) basis, then the EventFinder site will be as up to date as those of the organizers.

Please see the details page for more, um, details.

Technical details are on a separate web page. The current draft of the EFML schema is here.

How You Can Participate

If you are an event organizer:

create an EFML web page about your event(s) (some tools are available below)
let others know about your EFML web page
keep your EFML web page up to date

If you maintain a web page with event schedules and calendars:

gather data from EFML web pages
encourage event organizers to use EFML

If you use the web to find information about events:

please provide feedback on how this all works!

Everyone:

please send me ideas, questions and comments (e-mail address below)

Tools

Creating XML can be tedious, so why not use a computer to do it for us? Here are links to "fill in the blank" forms to create EFML entries for:

venues (create venues, then events)
events (a SINGLE event!)
series (events that occur each month)

After generating the EFML text for an item, copy it into your .efml file. Remember to start the file with an <efml> tag and to end it with an </efml> tag.

More to come... I also maintain the semi-official Sanctioning Planning Calendar of Orienteering Events.

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Mail (but not spam) is welcome to: schuh AT farmdale D0T com

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