We need to add support for facilities to the Modelling Opportunity Data specification.

Proposal

We've identified the following use cases to support adding facilities (e.g. squash courts, pitches, table tennis tables):

• What facilities are available at a location?
• What activities can be carried out in this facility?
• How do I find this specific squash court?
• What dates and times can I book this squash court?
• Is this squash court still available at a given time?

Modelling the spatial relationship and configuration of facilities within leisure centres is complex. For example the same sports hall can be used in different configurations. Capturing these details are not important for our primary use cases. An end-user booking a squash court does not need this detail.

Similarly, an end-user booking a court or table tennis table needs to know which leisure centre to turn up to, but they don't need to know exactly which court or table they will be using. They are interested in booking a facility for a period of time.

Finally, an end-user is not really interested in the difference between fixed facilities vs equipment like table-tennis tables that might be moved around a location. They're just interested in booking a space to take part in a physical activity.

Our proposed approach is to treat the availability of a squash court or pitch as a product that is being offered by the leisure provider.

We plan to call this product a Bookable Facility.

Describing a Bookable Facility (Product)

We need to be able to capture the following information:

• name, title, description, images and other descriptive information
• the facility that is being booked via a location property
• the availability of the facility (see below)
• the price for booking the facility, via an offers property
• the type of activity that the facility covers, via the existing activity property. This will allow an application to filter our Bookable Facilities that aren't associated with, e.g. squash or football.

Availability of a Bookable Facility

We propose to handle the availability of a facility by treating the "slots" in which it can be booked, as a series of Events. For example, a list of 30 minute events can describe the availability of a table tennis table over the course of a day.

This allows us to use the existing features of the data model to describe events, event schedules and event availability.

We will however need to define two new EventStatusTypes to say that a slot is Available or Booked. The existing Schema.org list of statuses doesn't cover that use case.

Describing the facility a user is booking

In the current opportunity model we say that fixed facilities, like squash courts or swimming pools are Places.

So where we do need to describe the location being booked, we can use the existing data model.

We may need to capture some additional attributes of facilities, e.g. "indoor" or "outdoor". Or types of pitch.

Questions

1. Are there other use cases which we haven't recorded?
2. Is "Bookable Facility" a good name? (If not, then please provide a suggestion)
3. Is there other information about a Bookable Facility we should be recording?
4. Does the suggested approach to describing availability seem reasonable?
5. What information might we need to capture about the facility that a user is booking?