◀ 6.1. PIMO Calendar endpoint

6.1.1. Synchronizing calendar events between applications and the PIMO

The Semantic Desktop allows to manage events and reminders in the PIMO. For third party applications, the PIMO provides a calendar endpoint serving the standard protocol CalDAV to synchronize calendar events. To do so, the PIMO interprets some of the stored events or reminders as calendar events.

CalDAV is a standard internet protocol for accessing scheduling information on a server. Using this, events are part of the PIMO, can be annotated and delivered to calendar software and devices supporting CalDAV such as Mozilla Thunderbird (with Lightning calendar) or the iPhone.

The following video shows some basic functionalities like creating an appointment, rescheduling or deleting it while especially focusing on the interplay of PIMO5 and our Mozilla Thunderbird (Lightning) plug-in.

6.1.2. Calendar events are things in the PIMO

Utilizing that also calendar events are "only" things in the PIMO and, hence, provide all the means you are used to have with other things, you can take full advantage of search and annotation power.

Imagine you are looking for a note associated with a certain meeting which you are not able to find right away. You could use the meeting entry in your calendar as a starting point. The following video illustrates this using an example.

Events deliver evidences for forgetting

Similar to the task management section, events also deliver good evidences to estimate forgetting value. In most cases, events that are occurring far in the future and events that have occurred in the past are not relevant for the current work. Of course, this does not hold for all events, but for many if not most of them. Technically, this means, we can use start and end date to trigger a dramatic drops and rises of memory buoyancy values (drop low long before the event starts, rise when is gets near, drop off after the event is over).

If a events are very rich in terms of semantic descriptions (number of relations etc.) and in terms of high interaction along some period of time, this indicates that the event is or was potentially important. Such events can be preserved automatically when the evidence is high enough.

Events deliver good candidates for preservation contexts

Throughout all human history, events have always been a good choice to set someone into context. For example, "After the second world war, ..." is a good prelude to set the read in context of the following text. Hence, we will also make use of events as context providers. Of course, for the personal preservation, we will not have such big events like world wars, however, there will be lots of birthdays, social gatherings, meetings, fairs, conferences, etc. If the event was "big" enough, the user can remember and reminisce the context easy - or at least much easier than without the given event.