Re: Opening hours for ContactPoint

Hi Jens:

On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 03:16:15PM +0200, Jens Rantil wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I recently added schema.org to pages such as
> http://www.telavox.se/kontakt/kontakta-oss/ (lang: Swedish). While doing
> this I stumbled across a use case that I couldn't express in
> http://schema.org markup. Namely, I wanted to mark up opening hours for our
> customer support.
> 
> The problem is that our customer support is only reachable through phone.
> http://schema.org/OpeningHoursSpecification can only be expressed for
> http://schema.org/LocalBusiness and http://schema.org/Place while our
> customer support is neither of those; we are a national company, thus not
> local, and our customer support does not have a geographical location (that
> we are willing to publish). Currently, I marked our customer support as
> http://schema.org/ContactPoint and freestyled by adding the "openingHours"
> property within that scope. Two questions:
> 
> First, is this something that would be of interest to add as a property
> ("openingHours") to http://schema.org/ContactPoint? I believe it could be a
> very common use case.

Agreed. Many businesses and organizations offer customer service (via
phone, email, instant message, whatever) that is limited to specific
hours and which has no particular geographical location. I was worried
for a moment that ContactPoint is a child of Intangible, but it has
email / faxNumber / telephone so adding openingHours makes perfect sense
to me.
 
> Secondly, did I make the right choice to simply define "openingHours" to
> http://schema.org/ContactPoint? My page currently does not validate
> correctly. I have read http://schema.org/docs/extension.html and to me
> defining http://schema.org/ContactPoint/Service does not feel semantically
> correct. I am fairly new to schema.org. How would you do it?

Per http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2013Jun/0015.html
the "/" extension mechanism is essentially deprecated. Assuming you have
the option of using RDFa Lite rather than microdata to express
schema.org, I believe the suggested routes for an extension would be to
either or both:

a) Define the openingHours property in your own vocabulary and then mix
it in using RDFa Lite.

b) Put together a proposal to add it to schema.org proper so that you
eventually don't have to maintain your own vocabulary.

I suspect doing (a) strengthens (b), particularly if it's a common case.

(Aside: I'm relatively new to the extensions idea myself. I recently
stumbled over the deprecation of "/" after spending a day or so
implementing a proof-of-concept with it, and so am motivated to try and
help get http://schema.org/docs/extension.html updated to a consensus
position on best practices for extending schema.org)

Received on Thursday, 18 July 2013 14:17:40 UTC