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