Re: makesOffer should accept Service

I will second the importance of establishing a new type: Service.  We have run into this need in many cases — often where there is a hotel providing guest services of various kinds.

I believe that the semantics of Services are substantially different than those of Product.   Services often have rates rather than unit prices (e.g., lawyers’ hourly rates), criteria for fulfillment and completion, are typically time-bound (per month, per year, etc.) and have terms and conditions substantially different than products.  When one considers the range of LocalBusinesses encompassed by Schema, many (if not most) are rendering services rather than selling products.  Service is literally an intangible, and should probably be located as a subclass of Intangible.   It also forms part of some proposed extensions for LodgingBusiness.

What do you think?  How might we press this idea forward?

Rob

On Jan 1, 2014, at 6:47 PM, Tyler Shuster <tyler.herrshuster@gmail.com> wrote:

> Dan,
> 
> Thanks for the explanation. That makes more sense. According to the whatwg spec, "The item types of an item are the tokens obtained by splitting the element's itemtype attribute's value on spaces. If the itemtype attribute is missing or parsing it in this way finds no tokens, the item is said to have no item types." 
> 
> Is there anything keeping me from changing your fourth line to: <div itemprop="itemOffered" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product http://schema.org/Service">? While I understand that "Product" can also refer to a service, I don't find it as semantic.
> 
> 
> On Wed, Jan 1, 2014 at 2:22 PM, Dan Scott <dan@coffeecode.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 1, 2014 at 2:47 PM, Tyler Shuster
> <tyler.herrshuster@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'm just starting out here, but it seems to me that "makesOffer" should also
> > accept Thing/Intangible/Service. Specifically, I work for a computer repair
> > company and I want to be able to say that we provide a service, not a
> > product. My markup under "schema.org/LocalBusiness" is `
> > itemprop="makesOffer" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Service/"`.
> 
> Hi Tyler:
> 
> http://schema.org/makesOffer actually takes an Offer. Offer has an
> itemOffered property, which in turn points at a Product. The
> definition of http://schema.org/Product is that it includes commodity
> services; that is, your service _is_ the product.
> 
> Your markup should end up looking like:
> 
> <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization">
> <h1 itemprop="name">Computer Repair Inc</h1>
> <div itemprop="makesOffer" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer">
> <div itemprop="itemOffered" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
> <h2 itemprop="name">Computer repair</h2>
> </div>
> <div itemprop="price">$100 / hour</div>
> </div>
> </div>
> 
> (You would flesh it out further, of course).
> 
> Name aside, is there anything about "Service" vs "Product" that you
> feel you need to describe your offering that the current Offer /
> Product approach does not cover?
>