I’ve been working this weekend on creating TMC (Tag My City) events’ calendar. I’ve already finished the prototype and both Callie and Cade seem to like it.

The production version of the calendar will have event’s name, date, time, address, description, category, tags and access level (public or private). It will also have links to the place of the event and to all the users attending that event.

The calendar can be filtered by date, category, city, place(restaurant, university, etc.) or user

Oh I almost forgot, TMC calendar is compliant with hCalendar

We are still planning on launching the beta version of TMC (www.tagmycity.com) on August 31 without making changes to the project scope…. not yet ;)

Tag My City(TMC) team has been updating the website�s XHTML/CSS to be Microformats compliant.
By adopting Microforamts, TMC�s public information will be more accessible on the web.
In addition, events calendar and contacts information can be integrated and reused easily between different applications. For example; you could automatically synchronize your cellphone or desktop calendar with TMC events calendar. And you can add restaurants� contact information to your address book with a click of a button.

Background information

Web content is usually created for human consumption without paying attention to machine readability making it difficult to provide elegant solutions to information retrieval and data integration.

This problem is what�s known as transforming data into information. Most solutions propose adding metadata(description) to data to give it meaning, thus to make it understandable by machines.

Semantic Web encourages using standardized vocabularies to describe data. As the name implies, standardized vocabularies are standard keywords or tags that describe data.

Microformats provide powerful yet simple sets of data formats that can be simply added to web content to make it both readable by humans and machines.
These sets are growing very fast to cover most forms of data e.g. contacts, reviews, events, resumes, listings, tags, etc.

Using Microformats is very easy. For example if you want to present a user name in your web content then you use the standard tags to describe both first name and last name. Let�s say �fn??? means full name. Now you can add �fn??? to your XHTML


<span class=???vcard???> <span class=???fn???>Kinan Sweidan</span></span>


When a machine reads �vcard??? it understands that the tag contains contact information. Similarly when it reads �fn?, it understands that �fn? means full name.

This approach is very powerful because it allows accurate information retrieval. Let�s say I want to look up reviews for �McDonalds??? by �Bill Clinton?, the machine (in this case the search engine) will try to deliver accurate information by searching metadata (for example �fn? and �hreview?) combined with my keywords (�Bill Clinton? and �McDonalds???)

Microformats make data integration much easier allowing different applications to exchange and reuse data.

Callie has already started blogging on Tag My City. The blog is about music, art, fashion, food and culture in the Dallas area.

Ximda team is working hard on getting Tag My City website lunched by the end of August. We are planning on having a website launch party by Sptemper. If you are in the Dallas area and like to come to the party, contact me to send you an invitation.

I’ve been working lately on my newest website TagMyCity.com. The website will allow users to do the following:

• Create user profile
• Add places e.g restaurants, spas, clinics..
• Review places according to service, price, dress code, parking…
• Upload pictures of places and users
• Create events calendar for each city
• Create groups and social networking

The website will also provide users with maps and driving directions using Google maps APIs. All the activities are real time which means when a user creates a place, the place will be created right away with no moderation (like wiki)

I usually like to push a slim version v1.0 as fast as possible because it keeps me excited about the project and it provides valuable feedback from first wave of users. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case with TagMyCity.

I felt yesterday that I was getting intimidated by the size of the project and it’s taking me too long to finish it. So according to the time, budget and scope triangle I have no choice except to scale back the scope.

Here I am trying to define the most important parts that I need to have in v1.0.

1. Create a place, review it and upload pictures (place pictures)
2. Create user profile and upload user’s pictures
3. Limit searches for places by city with no distance predefined
4. Get longitude and latitude of the place address (using web-service SOAP or XML-RPC) and locate it on Google map

So now that I have my new requirements written down, I am going back to my trusty Ruby on Rails (RadRails) IDE to continue coding. I will update this list weekly and document my progress.

If you are not familiar with Tag My City project, please read this first.
I am doing some progress on Tag My City website. The following functionalities are almost fully implemented:

• Add a new place
• Get the longitude and latitude of a place
• Review a place
• Upload pictures of a place

I am still not sure if v1.0 should cover all US. cities or just Dallas. I will be making a decision about that in the next two weeks.