Re: Proper schema.org markup of repeating / recurring events?

Sorry, just jumping in to this conversation now. Are you using microdata?

If so, you should be able to use microdata's itemref
attribute<http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/microdata.html#attr-itemref>to
handle this. The itemscope and itemtype (
schema.org/Event) for each event would be placed around the date itself.
You would then place an itemref that references the single description (and
any other shared properties) within each item.

I don't know whether the search engines fully support advanced microdata
features like itemref, but if they do then I think this is exactly the use
case itemref is designed for.

-Lin

On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 12:53 PM, Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org> wrote:

> Hi Sean,
>
> On 20 December 2011 16:20, Sean Carlos <sean@antezeta.com> wrote:
> > I have several cases of repeating / recurring events, such as a
> > monthly business networking lunch, where the only data elements which
> > change from event to event are the dates.
> >
> > It appears to me that schema.org doesn't yet address this particular
> use case?
> >
> > The current solution appears to be to repeat each event, including the
> > duplication of each data element.  I'm thinking of using the search
> > engine frowned-upon <meta> tags to hide the repeated data in
> > successive event dates.
>
> Thanks for raising this. It's a fair question to ask. I have some
> sympathy with Martin Hepp's view, that we may be better off
> materialising multiple event descriptions, rather than assuming smart
> clients. Robert Kost suggested ISO-8601 however many tools use
> restricted subsets of that standard, so I'm not sure that would be a
> strong candidate.
>
> I have summarised discussion so far in our Wiki at
> http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/RepeatingEvents and opened an issue
> tracker on this at https://www.w3.org/2011/webschema/track/issues/11
> since whatever we conclude should be documented.
>
> There is also some earlier work on representing iCalendar in RDF, see
> http://www.w3.org/wiki/RdfCalendarDocumentation and
> http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfcal/ as well  as the fairly widely adopted
> hcalendar work from the Microformats community,
> http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar  (I don't see the word 'repeat'
> in that last link but I've not yet dug very deeply).
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
>


-- 
Lin Clark
DERI, NUI Galway <http://www.deri.ie/>

lin-clark.com
twitter.com/linclark