Welcome and Background

Felipe Santi and I welcome you to the Tourism Structured Web Data Community Group.

This group was set up in response to a thread, Tourism Schema, that Felipe started on the Schema.org Community Group mailing list.

We are a small company of consultants in the tourism industry focused on helping tourist destinations and services to market themselves. For that purpose we have recently built a web platform <http://www.inventrip.com>, which makes heavy use of tourism categories to describe places the tourists can visit or things they can do.

We would like to migrate the existing categories in our platform to schema.org classes, however that would require extending classes (e.g. TouristAttraction) to cover up more detailed use cases frequent in the tourism industry.

It was clear from the following messages that there was interest in discussing enhancement and possible extension to the Schema.org vocabulary to help with the structured markup of tourism related information.  Also there was interest in sharing best practice in the ways to this.  Hence this group.

Tourism covers broad areas of markup interest, from locations and transport to hotels and disability access etc.  Schema.org is also very broad.  So it is hoped that much of what is required is already available, or being proposed – there is a hotels extension already in the proposal stage. The enhancements needed may well be minimal, and much of the work of this group will be around  identifying use cases and capturing best practice to satisfy them.

We will have a wiki soon to capture such work in.  In the meantime, please don’t hold back with suggestions, and potential use cases for us to engage with.

Richard Wallis.