Time-Based (Calendar) Maps

Recurring Publicly Significant Event Seed Branch

MindManager provides an unparalleled range of ‘information cartography’ functionality that enables  contextual knowledge to be embedded and attached to map branches in multiple ways…

Image: Event Icon
Most events have an associated icon image –  ‘national days’ have the country’s flag, official UN Observances have the UN flag, religeous observances have a bespoke icon for the religeon. Other types of events don’t have one.

Note(s)
i) Each event icons was originally is a 24 x 24 pixel PNG file, optimised to minimize the file size.

Text: Event Title & Type
Richly formatted text string of the name by which the event is commonly known in bold and some basic information on the ‘type’ of event it is in smaller, normal font below. The ‘type’ is one (or sometimes more) of the following…

• Astronomic – Lunar cycles or Seasonal Planetary
• Awareness Days – Cultural, Environmental, Health, Human Rights, Professional, Remembrance
• General Civil
• Religious – Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim
• UN Official Observances
• National Days of every ISO3166-1 country of the world

Note(s)
i) Our general calendars record events that occur regularly, usually once a year. An asterisk (*) after the name indicates the event does not occur on the same date each year eg. 3rd monday in May.

ii) For ‘national day’ events the full ISO3166-1 codes are included for completeness e.g. Grenada (GD – GRD – 308).

iii) There is a balance between some additional information to help the user place the event in context, and overloading the branch with too much information that visually overwhelms the user.

iv) More contextual information about the event is provided by index marker tags.

Attached Note: Event description
This provides brief contextual knowledge about the event around it’s timing and significance, which will probably be adapted from a Wikipedia article (which will be linked to). Timing can be…

• Fixed to a generic calendar date (e.g. ‘May Day’ is aways observed on May 1st each year).
• Moveable relative to the calendar month (e.g. the ‘May Day Pubic Holiday’ in the United Kingdom is observed on ‘the first monday in May’, whatever date that is).
• Moveable relative to astronmical events (e.g. some religeous events are determined by lunar cycles, so the first Sunday after the first full moon after such and such…).

Note(s)
i) Further information about the event will be found on the attached hyperlinks to the free, online public domain knowledge resources about them. Further information about the occurrence of the event in terms of more culturally relevant calendars can usually be found on the Wikipedia page.

Index Marker Tags & Groups: Various
Arranged in groups and attached to branches as required, index marker tags…

• provide additional contextual knowledge about the seed branch, visiable to all users.
• enable dynamic filtering of the map content to only show / hide branches that have been tagged with the selected marker

The inder marker tags attached to this seed topic are from the following groups…

EVENTS – Date Fix – How the date of the event is fixed. Is it always on a specific date (eg. ‘May Day’ is aways on May 1st), or does it vary relative to the calendar month (eg. the ‘May Day Pubic Holiday’ in the UK is on ‘the first monday in May’, whatever date that is) or the lunar cycle? 3 tags – Fixed, Variable (Calendar) and Variable (Lunar).

EVENTS – Astronomical – Predicatably recurring significant events in the annual machinations of Planet Earth that are beyond our control, but nonetheless have influence over all our societies…

• Lunar – The phases of the moon recurring each lunar month. 4 tags – New Moon, 1st Quarter, Full Moon & 3rd Quarter.
• Planetary – Events that mark planet Earth’s annual passage around the Sun and the passing of the seasons. 4 tags – 2 Equinoxes in March & September and 2 Solstices in June & December.

EVENTS – International – Internationally significant public events of the following ‘types’…

• Awareness Days – Events officially organised by persons or organisations for the purposes of celebration, education and action – celebration of past achievements in a particular area of human endeavour, education about problems and barriers that still exist in the world, and the action needed to be taken by everybody to tackle them. 7 tags (not necessarily mutually exclusive) – Cultural, Environmental, Health, Human Rights, Professional & Remembrance.
• General Civil Observances – Events that are generally observed in a society each year. Some may be ‘officially’ designated by the church or state, whilst the origins of others may be more obscure. Whatever, their observance is part of the civic year. Some may be observed in public on the streets with parties and a sense of ‘joi de vivre’, whilst others it is just at home with family & friends. 1 tag.
• Religious Observances – Major religeous festivals are often public holidays in countries where the religeon is significant. Even when it isn’t, they will be significant in the lives of your friends and colleagues who practice it. 7 tags for the major religeons – Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish & Muslim.
• United Nations Official Observances – The UN has designated days, weeks, years, and decades for observance to promote international awareness on significant issues and provide a springboard for awareness-raising actions by the organizations & offices of the UN system, governments, civil society, the public & private sectors, schools, universities and just general citizens around the world. 1 tag that is used alongside the ones for ‘Aawareness Days’.

Note(s)
i) Events can have more than one of these tags.

EVENTS – National Days – The day on which an ISO3166-1 designated country publicly celebrates it’s nationhood may be the date of independence, of becoming a republic, or a significant date for a patron saint or a ruler (such as a birthday, accession, or removal). The national day is often a public holiday. Many countries celebrate more than one national day, whilst a small number don’t celebrate any. By linking through to Wikipedia articles about the country (and the public holidays if available) we want to celebrate the range of national cultures withinyour circle of family, friends and colleagues. In these days of globalisation us citizens of the world have never mixed together as friends, neighbours, colleagues & lovers to the extent we do now, so anything that increases our mutual understanding of where we’ve all come from and where (and when) we all want to go next, can only be welcomed. – 249 tags (one for each ISO3166-1 country).

Note(s)
i) There are a handful of non-sovereign countries for which no ‘national days’ could be found.

ii) Sometimes the CIA factbook listed several ‘national days’ so after further research we made an executive decision which one to list.
Wikipedia often, but not always, has an article on the national day itself. This is linked to if it could be found.

iii) Wikipedia usually has an article (or section of article) listing public holidays for each country. This is also linked to on the branch if it could be found.

EVENTS – GEO – UN Geoscheme – Devised by the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), the UN Geoscheme divides the countries of the world into ‘standard’ regional (‘continental’) and sub-regional (‘sub-continental’) groups, with standard names and numeric codes:-

• WORLD (001)
• AFRICA (002) – Eastern Africa (014), Middle Africa (017), Northern Africa (015), Southern Africa (018) & Western Africa (011)
• AMERICAS (019) – Northern America (021), Latin America and the Caribbean (419), Caribbean (029), Central America (013) & South America (005)
• ASIA (142) – Central Asia (143), Eastern Asia (030), Southern Asia (034), South-Eastern Asia (035) & Western Asia (145)
• EUROPE (150) – Eastern Europe (151), Northern Europe (154), Southern Europe (039) & Western Europe (155)
• OCEANIA (009) – Australia and New Zealand (053), Melanesia (054), Micronesia (057) & Polynesia (061)

By using tags from this group in conjunction with those from ‘EVENTS -GEO-ISO3166-1′ the map can be’ geo-filtered’ to show only events from particlar ‘places’.

Note(s)
i) Users should be aware that as far as the United Nations Statistics Division classification of international regions and sub-regions is concerned, “the assignment of countries or areas to specific groupings is for statistical convenience and does not imply any assumption regarding political or other affiliation of countries or territories”. As such it can sometimes be counter-intuitive eg. Cyprus (CP – CYP – 196) is classified as being part of Western Asia, not Europe, whilst the Russian Federation (RU – RUS – 643) is part of Eastern Europe, not Asia. 

EVENTS – GEO – ISO3166-1 – ISO3166: Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions comes in 3 parts…

• ISO 3166-1 – Country Codes
• ISO 3166-2 – Country subdivision codes
• ISO 3166-3 – Codes for country names which have been deleted from ISO 3166-1 since its first publication in 1974.

By using tags from this group in conjunction with those from ‘EVENTS -GEO-UN Geoscheme’ the map can be’ geo-filtered’ to show only events from particlar ‘places’. This group can also apply to international events that have a national focus eg. Chinese New Year. – 249 tags (one for each ISO3166-1 country).

Note(s)
i) Updates to ISO 3166-1 are posted in official newsletters on the ISO3166 website. Note that updates occur very infrequently (there’s also a handy update history here).

ii) Although many countries on the ISO3166-1 list are Dependent States & Territories, it does not include all dependent territories and possessions of a particular Sovereign State ie. a dependent territory is not automatically classed as a separate country.

iii) Similarly the ISO3166-1 list does include some Countries whose status as a Sovereign State is in dispute eg. the short name of the Republic of China (TW – TWN – 158) is listed as “Taiwan, Province of China”, but not all de-facto states eg. Transdniestrian Moldovan Republic “Transnistria” (a de facto independent state inside Moldova).

iv) The ‘Short Name’ listed on the ISO3166-1 webpage is sometimes actually the long name. Sometimes this is to minimise confusion between States with similar names eg. the official short name listed for the Republic of Congo-Brazzaville (CG – COG – 178) is “Congo” whilst that for The Democratic Republic of the Congo (CD – COD – 180) is “Congo, The Democratic Republic of the”. In other instances however there is no obvious reason eg. Islamic Republic of Iran (IR – IRN – 364) is listed as “Iran, Islamic Republic of “, rather than simply “Iran”, or Syrian Arab Republic (SY – SYR – 760) listed as “Syrian Arab Republic”, rather than simply “Syria”, which are the official short names cited in other sources eg. Wikipedia list of countries. Note also that sometimes the official long name is the same as the short name.

EVENTS – GB – Annually recurring events of national public significance specifically in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. 3 tags – General Civil, National Patron Saints Day and Public Holidays.

EVENTS – GEO – ISO3166-2-GB – Official codes for the sub-national divisions of the United Kingdom, which is quite a complex entity in terms of geographies. As well as the 4 individual ‘home nations’ they are also combined in different ways. 7 tags – United Kingdom (GB-UKM), Great Britain (GB-GBN), England (GB-ENG), England and Wales (GB-EAW), Northern Ireland (GB-NIR), Scotland (GB-SCT) and Wales (GB-WLS).

Note(s)
i) Each of the 4 home nations has further subdivisions as part of ISO 3166-2-GB but these are not included in the group as they are not relevant in the context of ‘geo-tagging’ of ‘national’ events…

• England – 27 two-tier counties, 36 metropolitan districts, 55 unitary authorities, 32 London boroughs and 1 city corporation
• Northern Ireland – 11 districts
• Scotland – 32 council areas
• Wales – 22 unitary authorities

Note(s)
i) The names of the marker tag groups are prefixed acccording to the ‘type’ of marker tags they contain..

• EVENTS – prefix indicates tags to do with an event that can be added to a calendar map – the ‘type’ of event, how the date of it fixed etc.
• GEO – prefix indicates geographic tags, usually areas of some kind, often in a hierarchy eg. UN Geoscheme regions, sub-regions, countries, states, counties, communities etc. The names of GEO tags incorporate the official ID codes as well as names, and will always be present in some form in ‘atlas’ knowledge maps. GEO tags allow ‘spatial intelligence’ to be built into a map, even if it isn’t structured in a geographic way. When a map is ‘geo filtered’ using one of these tags it is the equivalent of using ‘Lookup Tables’ in ‘GIS’.
• RESOURCE – prefix indicates some aspect of a resource, such as the type of resource or who is responsible for creating / maintaining it.
• TIME – prefix indicates time based tags. These can be generic (eg. months of the year, days of the week etc.) or specific (eg. a year, a date etc.). TIME tags will always be present in some form in ‘calendar’ knowledge maps.

ii) Within MindManager, tags…

• provide a useful means of internal navigation between map topics (clicking on the branch that is shown as being tagged with that marker in the ‘Index Task Pane’ will immediately focus the map on that banch).
• can be generated automatically from branches (the title of the parent branch is the group name and those of all the immediate sub-branches become the individual tags within the group) .
• can be copied and pasted in their groups from one map to another.

Attached Hyperlinks: Various – See next section for full details