Berkeley Campus-Wide Event Calendar

The Problem With Web-based Campus Calendars

Due to the decentralized nature of computing on the Berkeley campus, different schools, departments, and other campus organizations often create applications on an “ad-hoc” basis. The lack of campus-wide guidelines and standards for designing and building applications make it difficult for developers to plan for interoperability and reuse. Consequently, the Berkeley campus is inundated with applications serving a similar purpose and repurposing similar content but built with different technologies and based on different, and often incompatible, data models. Although this is the case for many types of applications on campus, our group has decided to focus our master's project on creating a campus-wide calendaring application. The creation of this central campus calendaring system and repository would allow different campus departments and organizations to easily share their event information.

As one can imagine, there are many web-based calendars on the Berkeley campus containing events of interest to the entire campus community and events intended for a particular audience. Many of these events are cross-listed in different calendars. Usually the process of cross-listing an event requires manually copying the event information from one calendar and pasting it into the next. This is problematic in many ways. First, the process of re-entering event information wastes time and is inherently error prone. Second, replicating event information increases data storage costs, can compromise the general integrity and timeliness of event information, and can increase overall complexity. Finally, incompatible data models limit the amount and type of event information that can be repurposed. These issues hinder the creation and consumption of web-based event information on the Berkeley campus.