16-199: Building the Future
Spring 2004
Centralized Campus-Wide Calendar Project
It is my goal to develop a uniform database schema (and the necessary programs to populate it from any other databases I can locate) to store information about all events occupying any room on campus. There presently exist a large number of completely uncoordinated databases (as well as many webpages that are simply manually updated) containing specific information, such as room reservations, class schedules, student activities, seminar information, etc., that make life difficult for anyone seeking a general overview of what is going on where on campus at any given moment.
Such a database would be most useful for autonomous agents, such as Valerie the roboceptionist, that need to be able to offer information about presently occurring events rapidly on-demand. Additionally, there are a multitude of other projects, in several departments, that could benefit from this information.
To date, I have only had time to locate a few useful sources of specific event information and experiment briefly with a CorporateTime C API that could be used to conveniently access some of these databases.
I intend to spend time this summer developing the most useful database schema and the necessary software to retrieve this information. The sheer usefulness of this project to even myself, personally, provides significant motivation to see something like this come to fruition.