Shema Tourism
Working Group Charter
1. Mission
The mission of the Schema Tourism Working Group is to provide reference vocabularies for the touristic domain. This incorporates domain analysis, domain specification, schema.org modeling and mapping, annotation development and deployment practices of extending publishing vocabulary schema.org for touristic domain. The purpose of the Schema Tourism Working Group is to facilitate and communicate the use of semantic technologies in tourism providing recommended standard of using schema.org vocabulary and its extensions for correct and valid annotation of different service types relevant in tourism area.
2. Scope
The aims of Schema Tourism Working Group are the following:
- Defining a vocabulary for touristic information sources based on restricting and extending the schema.org vocabulary. The aim requires us to define the existing service types relevant in tourism and analyze the content used in their online presentations.
- Mapping to a domain specific subset of schema.org. This aim covers the design and implementation of the mapping mechanism between various schemas. It builds upon the results of domain analysis and maps them into a common, unified model based on schema.org. If there are no suitable classes in schema.org, then it is necessary to develop deeper and more specialized vocabularies and start the formal and demanding process of extending the official schema.org standard.
- Development of annotations. The annotation of content from a particular source is performed based on the content data structure. If content has been structured with a structured data format then the annotation can be performed automatically. If not, then a manual annotation needs to be done. The automatic annotations are developed based on a domain specific editor, wrapper and mapping tools, and a semantic validation mechanism.
- Deployment of annotations. Since the targeted system might use a different CMS, programming language, or database, the JSON-LD format is more flexible for embedding the annotation into the targeted system. The produced annotations will be stored in a repository on the open source platform and the mapping will be generated such that the publishing tools can provide a correct annotation to all incoming requests from client.
3. Out of scope
The focus of the working group is on building structure data models for tourism. Everything that falls outside this domain is not going to be considered by this working group.
4. Deliverables (inputs, list, template, heartbeat req, development process, versioning)
The working group will take as input existing standards and specifications that are relevant for describing tourism related information. In particular, the working group will try to align its outcome with the de facto standard for structure data on the Web i.e. schema.org. The results of the working group will be documented in deliverables that are going to be published on the working group website. The working group will publish regular updates of its results. The deliverable development process followed by the working group is an iterative process, including: 1) creation of the deliverable by the authors, 2) provision of comments by the members of the working group, 3) updates of the deliverable by the authors. When the working group considers that no revisions are needed for given deliverables, their final versions will be published on the working group website under https://schema-tourism.sti2.org/Results. The versioning policy for the deliverables is based on the major and minor version numbers approach. These numbers are generally assigned in increasing order and correspond to new developments in the deliverables.
5. Schedule and duration
The working group will start its activity during September 2017. The working group will have succeeded when a general, structure data schema specification for tourism domain is provided. This objective will be fulfilled in at most two years from the start of the working group.
6. Participation
The initial chairs of the working group are: Oleksandra Panasiuk (oleksandra.panasiuk@sti2.at) and Ioan Toma (ioan.toma@onlim.com). The working group is open for new members that want to contribute to the creation of a structure data schema specification for tourism. People interested in joining the working group should send a short CV and a rationale to the chairs of the working group. The working group will take a decision about any new application in at most one week from the moment the application is received.
7. Meetings
This working group will meet regularly in weekly teleconferences, as well as in face-to-face meetings at least once per month.
8. Communication, confidentiality
The working group’s web page is: https://schema-tourism.sti2.org/. For internal communication the group’s members will use the mailing list: schema-tourism@lists.sti2.org.
Information about the group’s deliverables and working drafts will be available under: https://schema-tourism.sti2.org/Results. Access to the internal mailing list schema-tourism@lists.sti2.org is restricted to the members of the working group.
9. IPR policy
The copyright for the deliverables, the trademark and registered names are own by STI International. Some of the working group results could be subject to patent applications. Such cases will be discussed and agreed within the working group. The working group will also decide which results will be made available to STI members and other parties. In general the working group aims to make publicly available as many of its results as possible. The generic model for tourism domain will be made available under Creative Commons license. The specific implementations based on data provided by touristic companies will be licensed under licenses commonly agreed with those companies.