Items for Rent

Hi All,

I'm working on a project that involves a company (I'll call them
"RentalCorp"), that rents electronic equipment and services, I'm running
into some limitations of the schema.org vocab, and I'm wondering if anyone
here has found workarounds.

Some background:

Rental, as a concept, seems largely limited to real estate and
automobiles. RentAction
<https://schema.org/RentAction>has only two properties unique to its type:
landlord and realEstateAgent.

Product <https://schema.org/Product>is the accurate type for many of the
pages I'm marking up, and intend to use *many *of Product's properties. I'd
also like to include "Offer <https://schema.org/Offer>" so that I can
describe "availability" and "condition" of items (e.g. this microphone is
"Like New" and "In Stock").

One big limitation I'm running into is in trying to describe the
relationship between "Price," which is mandated by some data linters
(notably Google's SDTT) and the concept of "request a quote."

This company -- and I suspect other companies/industries -- builds a quote
for each customer based on numerous factors, and does not publish pricing
(or even price ranges) for individual products or services that might be
part of that quote.

Price does allow for both number and text datatypes, but even text seems to
be very constrained. For example, I cannot get the following to pass linter
tests. Note my attempted workaround by using PriceSpecification to describe
this textually:


<script type='application/ld+json'>
{
  "@context":"http://schema.org",
  "@type": "Product",
  "@id": "
https://www.example.com/product/acme-microphone-x2000/product-x2000#product
",
  "name": "ACME Microphone X2000",
  "offers": {
    "@type": "Offer",
    "offeredBy": {
    "@id": "https://www.example.com/about#company"
    },
    "availability": "http://schema.org/InStock",
    "itemCondition": "NewCondition",
    "name": "ACME Microphone X2000 for rent",
  "price": "Available For Rent",
    "priceSpecification": {
      "@type": "PriceSpecification",
      "name": "Available for Rent"
      }
   }
}
</script>


NOTE: I also went down the path of trying potentialAction > RentAction
<https://schema.org/RentAction>, but that, too, expects Price with the same
constraints.

QUESTION 1: Has anyone had success describing items for rent that do not
have a numeric price specified?

QUESTION 2: Does anyone have thoughts about or see need for expanding the
available terms describing rental items generally?

Cheers,
--Eric

-- 
*Eric Axel Franzon*

Received on Wednesday, 8 March 2017 16:53:26 UTC