SPARQL Calendar Demo: Step-by-step Example

This is the third in a series of entries about the SPARQL calendar demo. If you haven't already, you can read the previous entry.

On #swig yesterday, bengee noted that he was unable to get the calendar demo to work. We didn't have a chance to delve into the particulars, but I'm pretty confident that the reason was the lack of a good answer to one of these two questions:

1. What in the world do I do with this thing?
2. How can I get this to work with my data?

The answer to the second question is that there are a number of conventions that data needs to observe for it to display properly in the calendar demo. I'll discuss those conventions as I go through the rest of this series, but most of them are also presented briefly on SparqlCalendarDemoUsage ESW wiki page. So without further ado, here is a walkthrough of using the SPARQL calendar demo:

1. Navigate to the demo
2. Add one or more URLs that resolve to FOAF files. For this walkthrough, click the add Alice link to add the Alice (demo) persona's FOAF file to the dataset. A list of people appears: in this case, we see Alice, along with URIs for Bob and myself.
3. (optional) Click discover more people. This follows the FOAF breadcrumbs protocol to build the dataset and find more people, and more information on already known people. In this case, we discover the names of Bob and myself, and also find DanC and Elias.
4. Make sure that April (2006) is displayed on the calendar. If attempting this in March, click the big right arrow next to the calendar to advance to April.
5. Check the checkboxes next to Alice and Bob.
6. Click refresh in the Calendars section of the righthand column to display all of Alice's and Bob's calendar events. You should see several events for each of them.
7. With Alice and Bob still checked, click on refresh in the Shared interests section of the righthand column to display the foaf:interests that Alice and Bob have in common. In this case, both Alice and Bob are interested in theater and in jazz.
8. Check the checkbox next to Theater.
9. Click the what can we do together? link. In this case, this shows that there's a performance of Arcadia going on in Boston, Massachusetts (mouseover events to see their location) from April 26–29. Because both Alice and Bob will be in Boston on April 28 and because both share an interest in theater, this event is shown as an activity that both people might enjoy attending together.

The mocked up data should work at least through the end of April. I'll update this space as I update the demo data to keep the demo personas functional.