Zones

It’s occurred to me that conferences (and music festivals) designate spacial locations as specific zones, but only in the context of that event.

The “Poster Area” or “Coffee Area” (or “The Green Peace Field”) only exists in the context of the event, it’s not a permanent property of that space.

Also, for describing conferences and workshops, it’s useful to know that a location is a room or building. (maybe levels and floors too, but that’s less important). The conference centre in Madrid which was used for WWW2009 was one building with levels on both the North and South end. Maybe the useful subdivisions are Room, Building Section, Building. Where Buildings contain building sections and rooms. Building sections contain building sections and rooms..

Also, conferences generally have two important locations, the City they are in (Madrid) and the building ore complex they are in. (perhaps complex or campus is a useful level above building?) I think it’s useful to model both these location relationships.

As with most systems, the really important thing is to make it easy to describe the data you’ve already got, and not force people to create data and mappings that they would not other wise bother with.

I’m also toying with modelling some data as a fixed data file, and the rest via a semantic wiki which extends the core data.