From our experience with the APIs of the big players in the event listing market (Upcoming, Zvents, Eventful, TicketMaster, etc.), it is evident there is no standard format being used to exchange event information behind the scenes.

 

Each API arbitrarily assigns its own naming scheme, date formats and data structure. We’ve had to pick up the slack at Localist by developing customized parsers to retrieve and standardize the information for each service.

 

We’d like to start a discussion with interested people in the industry about creating a standardized data interchange format. We’ve already created a preliminary standard called ELF (Event Listing Format) that can easily work with all existing services, along with an explanation of how it complements hCalendar. You can check out some example RAW XMLs too.

 

If you'd like to get involved, join this wiki, comment on this blog post or join the conversation in irc.freenode.net/elf

 

To throw around some ideas of possible applications for ELF, check the brainstorming page.

 

To see how other formats (hCalendar, iCalendar) compare, check out the other formats page.

 

Check the issues page.