Re: Need for a new type Activity

Hi Roy,

On 26 October 2011 19:24, Roy Lachica <roy@webnodes.com> wrote:
> Hi
> I was just adding Schema.org for a tourist site. In particular activities (Things to do at a location) and found a need for an Activity type.
> Many tourism websites separate tourist activities from tourist sites (what to do from what to see).
>
> Existing types such as http://schema.org/Event seem to be meant for a single event happening at a certain time at a certain location.
> http://schema.org/TouristAttraction don’t really match for activities such as shopping and eating out? From Wikipedia: “A tourist attraction is a place of interest where tourists visit, typically for its inherent or exhibited cultural value, historical significance, natural or built beauty, or amusement opportunities.”
> A page about Hiking should have links to places where you can go hiking, but the activity hiking itself is not really a tourist attraction?
>
> I would like to add activities that are also relevant in a non-tourist setting. Using TouristAttraction (typically used for things you go to see) therefore seem wrong. TouristAttraction is also a sub type of Place. Many activities are place independent.
>
> I would guess that search engine queries like “What to do in Rio” are just as much used as “What to see in Rio”.
> When searching for Shopping it would be nice to specify that i mean the activity of shopping so I can get a list of pages about shopping rather than a list of online shops.
>
> There are also many sites that contain general non-tourist activities that could benefit from an Activity type.
> By having an activity type, search engine users can differentiate between football as an activity, a football club or the object football.
>
> I would therefore like to suggest the type: Activity  (description: Something you can do at will, regularly or perhaps once in a lifetime)
>
> I am sure someone else has better suggestions for sub types, properties and descriptions. I was not able to find a good taxonomy or vocabulary but here’s a few suggestions for sub types [...]

Thanks for raising this, and the suggestions. Before jumping into
those specifics I think it's worth pointing out a difficulty we'll all
have here: if Schema.org starts to include big enumerated lists it
could become rather hard to maintain in the future. This was discussed
at last month's workshop; Guha and others suggested that Schema.org
should avoid such enumerations. Where they exist already in well
established systems, Schema.org could serve as a documentation hub,
pointing to those pre-existing lists. In this case, the scope of the
list is quite broad --- it's all things of things that people do, or
do for leisure.

One possibility to investigate here is to look to larger collections
to add in such detail. For example using a collection like Wikipedia
(or it's RDFization as DBpedia, or the proposed Wikidata work; or
Freebase...). At some point with Schema.org we have to say "ok,
enough! let's cut over to a larger community-maintained dataset". It
is not exactly clear where that cut point should be. There are points
within the current schema (eg. http://schema.org/HairSalon) where you
could argue the limit has been reached.  I wonder how many of the
activity-types listed here have nice solid obvious Wikipedia URLs
associated with them (and which are handled as wiki Categories), and
also whether they are modeled/described in anything like a consistent
manner there...

cheers,

Dan

Received on Friday, 28 October 2011 12:21:27 UTC