Defining Common Standards for Calendar Systems and Holidays

KDE is unique in the Linux ecosystem in providing Localization support for alternative Calendar Systems such as the Hebrew, Islamic and Jalali calendars, something Windows and OSX provide natively. This talk will explain why support for alternative Calendar Systems is important, and how collaboration is needed to create common definitions of the Calendar System calculations, translations and test cases. The talk will also examine options for using alternative Calendar Systems in conjunction with the iCalendar and vCard standards.

KDE also provides a library for calculating Public Holidays and other notable events which makes extensive use of the alternative Calendar Systems support. The talk will examine why the iCalendar standard is not sufficient for proper Holiday support and will propose a collaboration on a new common file format and library to share the laborious task of maintaining and translating the holiday database.

The intended audience will be people interested in Localization and PIM.