Proposal to kickoff group activity in 2016

Hi All,

Before taking some days off this holiday season, I would like to introduce some steps that we propose to initiate the group activity for 2016. Perhaps the term roadmap is adequate for this purpose.

Please consider the content as an individual contribution from Sismotur to start the debate, kindly please do not take this as an attempt to impose any methodology to this group, we are just trying to help.

Besides, Richard and I suggest to kick off the group activity in 2016 with a first (and if possible simple) example to improve schema.org. We think this would be good to provide traction and get the group to work around a specific subject.

Finally, please accept my apologies for any mistakes in the text, English is not my mother language.

All the best for the holiday season and 2016.

Kind regards,
Felipe

Roadmap proposal

1. Do a diagnostic of the existing vocabulary

The first thing we propose to do is to review schema.org as a whole in order to identify major improvement areas to the vocabulary.

I will use a real example for this, the Beach class, which is an important place for many tourism destinations. This class is a child of Civil Structure and has no properties of its own. As a result, the only way to describe it is to use the following properties:
– from CivicStructure: openingHours,
– from Place: address, photo, review…
– from Thing: name, url, description, image…

In our humble opinion, openingHours is of limited interest for a beach (at least in our home country, Spain, where most beaches are public).
We think this class could potentially benefit from:
(a) being a child of TouristAttraction (class without properties too!), from which it could inherit properties relevant to tourists,
(b) adding  properties to describe things such as the sand type (white, volcanic…), the setting (urban, natural), the type (quiet, nudist, lively, ideal for surfing…).
These properties are found in Tenerife’s website, http://www.webtenerife.co.uk/places-interest/beaches/
Please do not take this as a concrete proposal, but just an example to illustrate the point.

2. Establish a framework to adapt the class tree

Based on the result of the diagnostic, analyze the existing schema.org global class tree and propose improvements to it.

This involves mainly the following tasks:

• identify potentially missing (or redundant) classes, e.g. add a new Viewpoint class,
• propose modifications to the class tree (in particular adding relationships between classes), e.g. make Beach be a child of TouristAttraction.

As a result, we should get a clear picture of the transition between the existing class tree and an improved tree which is better suited for Tourism.

3. Model individual classes to match tourism industry needs

For each class identified as relevant for Tourism in step 2, analyze its properties and decide whether these need to be amended (i.e. add, modify, remove properties).
The gist of this work is to do here concrete proposals to schema.org involving class properties.

This is a work that can be made parallel for final classes (i.e. those with no children) if we all decide to make subgroups specialized in a particular domain (e.g. oenological tourism, sport tourism, cultural tourism… (*)). On the other hand, serializing the work is another valid option.

Furthermore, we could gather advice from experts to ensure each class gets the necessary properties for industry players having a stake on it. In that respect, we could bring tourism destinations specialized in the domain under analysis to the discussion table (e.g. subject matter experts from Canary Islands and Baleares tourism boards when analyzing the class Beach). This would allow us to take into account the tourism destination point of view, and make class properties relevant for the industry.
(*) These tourism categories are loosely taken from the current French national tourism plan.