From: Stephen Colebourne (scolebourne@btopenworld.com)
Date: Thu Oct 20 2005 - 15:40:24 CST
Hi all,
I lead the Joda-Time open-source project to provide a date and time 
library for the Java programming language - 
http://joda-time.sourceforge.net.
A recent initiative has been to build upon our foundation datetime 
classes to provided a much needed holiday library for Java. The purpose 
of such a library would be for a programmer to be able to query if today 
is a state holiday in France, or when the next Summer Bank Holiday is in 
the UK.
The raw data for when holidays occur would appear to be an ideal 
candidate for the CLDR repository. The data is based on the following 
factors:
- locale, such as region/country/international
- organization, such as government/company/church
- history, holidays vary by year, 'Spring Bank Holiday' can move from 
one date to another date, some holidays, like the 'Milenium day' happen 
just once
- date rules, such as last Monday in August
Rather than a small project like ours attempting to categorize this, we 
would rather work with CLDR if at all possible! (Or alternately, perhaps 
this data is already available in a structured format, like the Olson 
Time Zone database?)
We have so far developed a very *rough* first draft XML structure for 
the data. I have attached the DTD and the data for the UK that I have so 
far gathered to act as an example.
This mail is intended to gather feedback and opinions. (If its the wrong 
mailing list, wrong process or otherwise invalid please inform me and 
apologies!) I can be contacted privately too at this emails address if 
desired.
Looking forward to feedback :-)
Stephen
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Oct 20 2005 - 15:41:36 CST