A new IETF working group has been proposed in the Applications Area. The IESG has not made any determination yet. The following draft charter was submitted, and is provided for informational purposes only. Please send your comments to the IESG mailing list (iesg at ietf.org) by 2013-02-28. JSON data formats for vCard and iCalendar (jcardcal) ------------------------------------------------ Current Status: Proposed Working Group Assigned Area Director: Pete Resnick <presnick@qti.qualcomm.com> Charter of Working Group: jcardcal Working Group - JSON data formats for iCalendar and vCard. Problem Statement: The standard iCalendar [RFC5545] and vCard [RFC6350] data formats are in widespread use for calendaring and contacts data exchange. In addition to the text formats described in the base specifications, alternative XML formats have been defined ([RFC6321] and [RFC6351] respectively). Interest has been expressed in also having JSON [RFC4627] formats for both iCalendar and vCard to allow easier integration of such data with web or other Javascript based applications, and other JSON-based protocols being developed by IETF working groups such as jose, scim, and weirds. Because iCalendar and vCard formats have a similar schema (a component/property/parameter/value model) it is often the case that iCalendar and vCard data handling is carried out by libraries with a high degree of code re-use for each format. It is thus highly desirable that the JSON formats for iCalendar and vCard are aligned in terms of their JSON structures so that the policy of code re-use for iCalendar/vCard parsing/generation can continue. Objectives: The jcardcal working group is chartered to develop JSON-based data formats that are accurate, straightforward representations of iCalendar and vCard data, allowing for conversion between any of the various equivalent data formats without any loss of semantic meaning, and maximal interoperability. Consideration will be given to compactness and readability of the JSON data formats, whilst at the same time maintaining the underlying data models of the respective original formats. The JSON formats will re-use the extensibility model of the base formats. The JSON formats will use similar data models in JSON to allow for optimal code re-use when parsing/generating jCard and jCal. Syntactic requirements from other working groups looking to adopt the jCard or jCal data formats will be considered. However, changes to the semantics of vCard and iCalendar are out of scope. Requirements that are not explicitly mentioned in this charter will be considered so long as they do not conflict with the other stated objectives. Specific requirements for consideration are: * a need for conveying unstructured address information (weirds WG). Milestones: Mar 2013 - Determine initial requirements of other Working Groups. Mar 2013 - Accept jCard and jCal documents as Working Group items. May 2013 - Request publication of jCard document. Jun 2013 - Request publication of jCal document.
