The Colloquia & Talks system was designed as a datasource for both people and machines. The programatic interface to the system is the focus of this document.
Information about Talks past, present & future is available to everyone via RSS feeds. These feeds enable users to have an automatic listing of upcoming talks and also allow remote machines to have information about the events.
It is trivial to select a subset of the events in our database for listing. The main URL of the event feed is:
By default, the talks listed are limited to those talks upcoming in the next six weeks. This can be changed by manually setting thestarting and ending dates on the url string. For example, to retrieve the events from 11/1/2005 until 3/15/2006, the following request could be sent:
We can also limit the listing by how the talks are "flagged." There isn't a comprehensive list of tags (yet) but we know that there is an AI flag. So you can ask for all of the AI related talks from the prior selection like this:
No!
The feed from the colloquia system adds machine-readable versions of the information for your convenience. These elements are namespaced with "lcsr", and are in the following set:
lcsr:speaker => The speaker(s) at the event.lcsr:committee => The persons overseeing the PhD Defense / Qualifying Exam or the faculty host(s) for a Research Talk/DLS/Colloquium.lcsr:evtype => The type of event (Defense/Qual/Talk/DLS/Colloquium)lcsr:location => The location of the eventlcsr:title => Title of the eventlcsr:time => Time of the event (m-d-y hr:min am/pm)lcsr:organization => The organization to which the speaker belongs