Using web standards for timetabling
Patrick De Causmaecker, Peter Demeester, Yue Lu, Greet Vanden Berghe · 2003
With the advent of the Semantic Web we examine how the technologies that lie at its basis can be applied for timetabling. In this paper, we give some directions for using these recently developed techniques. Many researchers spend a lot of time re-implementing and modifying already existing heuristics in order to make them suitable for their particular problem. We now put forward how the Semantic Web could interpret problem specific knowledge, and thus improve the communication between heuristic approaches and any problem specification. The ideas behind the Semantic Web lead us to proposing a model for future timetabling development, which is based on loosely coupled components that communicate with each other by sending XML messages. The advantage of such a component model is that only a few components need to be adapted when transferring it from one timetabling application to another.