2. Summary

Resource interoperability is pragmatically impossible in the current state of applications. Only two attributes are found among 80% of the eleven applications, name and type, which provide very little information of a truly useful nature to recipients of any data from an external calendar system. We conclude that for such limited available attributes to be of value, useful information would have to be encoded in the name attribute itself (e.g., “Rm3209CSS” would indicate room 3209 in the Computer Sciences and Statistics building, but users of that information would have to have external information, in either their head or in a directory of buildings etc., to know something more useful about the room).

Across the eleven applications nearly fifty different attributes were used to define the constituent parts of a resource for the purposes of the applications. There are, however, only two attributes which are common among more than 80% the eleven applications surveyed and only an additional three more muster more than half of the eleven applications (and this only by using a broad definition of some attributes to collate then under one more general term, e.g., Contact Information included Address, Phone, FAX, and URL). These attributes with the percentages are listed in the following table.