Re: Opening hours for ContactPoint

In general, I see no problem with including ContactPoint or other types to the domain of openingHours.

In GoodRelations (from which openingHours stems) extension modules, there has frequently been the need to express availability times for services or parts of a business. A classics is in the hotel etc. extension, available at


	http://ontologies.sti-innsbruck.at/acco/ns


However, I slightly prefer a pattern with a new property "availabilityTimes" that links a set of suitable types (e.g. ContactPoint) to an OpeningHoursSpecification.

I prefer this new property for two reasons:

- availability times are in many contexts something different than opening hours, in particular for intangible services and (e.g. roadside assistance via phone, ham radio relay stations, etc.) and

- such a property will be particularly useful for future extensions for vertical domains, namely hotels (e.g. the sauna has different availability times than the reception etc.).

This is exactly how we did it in the above mentioned GoodRelations extension for hotels:

	http://ontologies.sti-innsbruck.at/acco/ns.html#availabilityTimes

And I fully agree with Dan that defining a new property in your own namespace and using RDFa for that extension looks like a very feasible approach.

By the way, that one is waiting for integration into schema.org. I has been on my desk for quite a while and I will tackle the task of drafting a derived proposal as soon as my resources permit.

Martin


On Jul 18, 2013, at 4:17 PM, Dan Scott wrote:

> 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)
> 

--------------------------------------------------------
martin hepp
e-business & web science research group
universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen

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Received on Thursday, 18 July 2013 16:41:15 UTC