Appointment Calendar
The allocation of appointments is increasingly IT-supported, e.g. some doctors and (few) authorities now allow their customers to book an appointment online. The specification of UNITED-PAGES also allows the customer to track the predicted start of his appointment. UNITED-PAGES thus offers an additional functionality for customers (and thus also for the scheduler) without much additional effort for the developers of corresponding scheduling tools. All that is required is to maintain the corresponding data on a UNITED-PAGES web server (via web interface) . From the customer's point of view, there is the additional advantage that there is no need for several different proprietary online portals / apps, but can be uniformly overlooked for every doctor, authority,. . .
UNITED-PAGES specifies (cal-UNIT) an extension of the iCalendar standard, that does not include a field for a predicted start that can be shifted continuously. As far as the timeliness of the data is concerned, the same applies here as for the vCard standard: a solution where a change has to be explicitly distributed again can hardly compete with UNITED-PAGES applications.
A delay ticker is known from train, airlines, parcel services, . . . Here, everyone is doing his own thing - the information is passed on to customers in different ways (e.g. Email with reference to proprietary online portal, proprietary app). The market potential for data in connection with appointments is enormous and the entire market is covered by diverse applications. UNITED-PAGES promises to complement existing solutions.