FW: Distance

Copy of an email reply sent directly to Andy in response to his email
directly to me posted by him on 29 October 2011.

Jim

 

From: Jim Rhyne [mailto:jrhyne@thematix.com] 
Sent: Saturday, October 29, 2011 8:59 AM
To: 'Andy Mabbett'
Subject: RE: Distance

 

Are you asserting that a Google search for "hotels near Disneyworld" would
invoke Google maps to find a route between each hotel in Orlando and compute
the distance in order to satisfy the query? That does not seem to be the
behavior exhibited. Excluding the merchant sponsored snippets, Google seems
to just rely on the text "hotel near Disneyworld" appearing in the page. 

I have doubts that the search engines would calculate and cache route
distances between places. It seems far more likely that the web page
providers would do this themselves and rely on semantic markup to allow the
search engine to find and index these calculations just for
resort/destination hotels and a few other businesses for which proximity to
a landmark is useful marketing content.

That you could rely on route calculators for this particular problem does
not address the larger issue of semantic markup of tabular data contained in
web pages.

Thanks, Jim

Jim Rhyne

Thematix, Inc.

 

From: pigsotwing@gmail.com [mailto:pigsotwing@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Andy
Mabbett
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2011 2:39 PM
To: Jim Rhyne
Subject: Re: Distance

 


This seems redundant; just publish the address and/or coordinates, and let
other - impartial - tools work out distances.

[on my mobile, sorry for top-posting]

-- 
Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
http://pigsonthewing.org.uk

On Oct 27, 2011 5:43 PM, "Jim Rhyne" <jrhyne@thematix.com> wrote:

Disclosure: I am affiliated with Rob Kost. We are currently doing markup for
some hotel sites.

 

A recurring structure on "resort" hotel sites is a table showing the
distance from the hotel to local attractions. For example, hotels in Orlando
often show distance to Disneyland, Wet 'n Wild, and so forth. Below is an
example of how such markup might be constructed:

 

<span itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Hotel>

  <span itemprop="name">a resort hotel</span>

  .

  <table>

    .

    <tr itemprop="distanceTo" itemscope
itemtype="http://schema.org/StructuredValue/PathDistance">

      <td itemprop="toDistance" itemscope
itemtype="http://schema.org/Distance">7 Mi</td>

      <td itemprop="toPlace" itemscope
itemtype="http://schema.org/TouristAttraction>

        <span itemprop="name">Disneyland</span>

      </td>

   </tr>

    .

  </table>

</span>

 

What we find awkward is the need to define a class (PathDistance) that
corresponds to a row in this particular table.

 

There are other tables that contain useful data: room rates, attraction
ticket prices as sold by the hotel for various classes of entry to the
attraction. Are we supposed to create classes for each such table we
encounter? Is there a better way to deal with this kind of HTML construct?

 

We also had to invent some new properties:

 

"distanceTo" is a new property of Place with a target type of PathDistance

"toPlace" is a property of PathDistance with Place as a target type

"toDistance" is a property of PathDistance with Distance as a target type

 

There really is not an existing schema.org property that could be extended
to define "distanceTo". The public documentation (including this forum) does
not seem to address the definition of new properties that extend schema.org.
Is it conceivable that there will be an extension mechanism based on OWL's
notion of top object property and subproperties? Or should we think to
create a vocabulary that defines these things and incorporates the reusable
parts of schema.org?

 

Thanks,

 

Jim Rhyne

Thematix Partners