Cultural Calendars for Programming and Querying
Stephanie Spranger · 2005
Calendar data such as dates are probably more than any other data domain a subject to interpretation. Calendars are human abstractions of the physical flow of time predominately depending on culture, especially religion and history. They allow for measuring time in dierent units like day, week, working day, and also teaching term. The vision of the Semantic Web is to enrich the current Web with well-defined meanings and to enable computers to meaningfully process such data. This paper contributes to the Semantic Web vision with a generic modeling language called CaTTS. Using CaTTS, one can easily define arbitrary calendars. The language provides with CaTTS-TDL, a tool to define calendars and CaTTSFDL, a tool to define calendar data, in particular dates to give calendar data well-defined meanings. Furthermore, CaTTS provides a way to enable computers to meaningfully process the calendar data. Thus, CaTTS brings important cultural artefacts, the calendars, on the (Semantic) Web.