Request for spec: track vs. type

[johnjohndoe]

:information_source: This topic was initially been posted here. In order to give everyone interested in the topic access to comment it was decided to continue the discussion here. This repository is more appropriate for more general topics related to the schedule data specification.

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Context

Both the schedule.xml and schedule.json contain track and type nodes resp. properties for an event.
The values of these properties are very similar - describing which category an event belongs to.

Android

In lack of a specification for these properties their values are merged in the 37C3 Fahrplan app, while giving track priority.

Request for specification

I would like to find out about the original purpose of these properties in Pentabarf, Frab, Pretalx.

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@saerdnaer , @toto, @manno, @rixx - please be welcome copy/paste your former responses here. That would be great.

[saerdnaer]

• track specifies the topic category of the event and is typically dropdown based on the conference configuration, now also exposed in the conference header in the schedule.xml/.json – eg. for 37C3:

  <track name="Sustainability & Climate Justice" color="#0084b0" slug="sustainability"/>
  <track name="Hardware & Making" color="#44357e" slug="hardware-making"/>
  <track name="Art & Beauty" color="#f9b000" slug="art-beauty"/>
  <track name="Ethics, Politics & Society" color="#e40429" slug="ethics-politics-society"/>
  <track name="CCC" color="#ffa500" slug="ccc"/>
  <track name="Entertainment" color="#4d4d4c" slug="entertainment"/>
  <track name="Science" color="#00a356" slug="science"/>
  <track name="Security" color="#18386b" slug="security"/>

• type the kind of the event itself, e.g. in frab:

https://github.com/frab/frab/blob/7ddfe97fe8ca2466eba6277f9385808013e0ba30/app/models/event.rb#L10

  TYPES = %w(lecture workshop podium lightning_talk meeting film concert djset performance other).freeze

We could add these to the schedule.xsd as examples like in the json schema: https://github.com/voc/schedule/blob/89a4a34c78f2df8111e65164c9acce110313fe6d/validator/json/schema.json#L243-L254

but first we should probably harmonise the values... there the repo also contains already an method for that: https://github.com/voc/schedule/blob/master/voc/tools.py#L280-L329

[rixx]

but first we should probably harmonise the values

fwiw, in pretalx, event types are user generated, as such, harmonising the data will always be event-dependent.