How to structure opening hours of a place? May-be there's even an ontology for it?

Question

Does anyone know any ontology which specifies opening hours of places? For example, I have a museum, which has 2 seasons. For low season (season start and end is specified), it is opened 10.00 - 18.00 on weekdays and 10-16 on saturday (on sunday it's closed), for high season it's opened 10-20 on weekdays and 10-18 on weekend.

If there is no ontology, may-be people have experience, how best to structure information like that?

I'm describing information in RDF. But whatever comments are welcome (even if you have relational database which holds given data).

Thanks

Giblet

Answer 1

You might find the W3C's RDF Calendar note useful. I've not tried it myself, but I can say that you probably want to represent your data in iCalendar format if you can.

Synclastic

Thanks! I will check it out. RDF Calendar seems to have to right goal (at least in the paragraph 11 they point out shop business hours representation). – Giblet

Answer 2

there is also schema.org - http://schema.org/Museum can have opening hours - its pretty poor modelling, but well supported by search engines if that was an objective

Travers

Hi Sweet Burlap, I am a co-founder of a french cooperative called Startin'blox. We basically build apps compliant with the LDP standards. We implemented an LDP server in DJango, and we are looking for someone to help on this bit. If you are interested, or know someone that might be, I'd love to chat : [email protected] Enjoy your weekend ! – Sienese

Answer 3

There is also ncal - http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/2007/04/02/ncal/ which is a revised version of W3C's ical

Travers

Answer 4

I have also seen it argued (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2011Dec/0062.html), that recurrent events should be modelled as individually rather than using what are essentially rule based expressions (eg. ical ncal etc.). so there is an opening duration for monday 09/07/2012 and another one for tuesday 10/07/12 - I don't agree with it, but its worth thinking about

Travers

Answer 5

http://openinghours.io defines an ontology to maintain opening hours. Using that ontology you can link to existing files (e.g. iCal) or include RDF structures (schema.org or RDFcal) as layers to form the right opening hours, indicating whether the calendar layer is describing are closing hours or opening hours.

Abdel

Answer 6

There is a large library of free data models here.

Perhaps parts of one of these schemas will have what you need.

Barbell