I work for a company that list small local business from a niche market in a website. Most of these companies have little infrastructure on the internet. So to improve visibility we are adding the Schema.org Local Business in their profiles.
We looked in the schema specification and the google documentation, but it isn't explicit anything about local business ownership. So it is not clear if this structured data allows listing other local businesses instead of your own.
Is it okay to use this schema to create rich snippet cards if you don't own the company? Can this have negative outcome as a Search Engine Optimization?
Providing structured data about other businesses (or any other domain) is perfectly fine. Structured data is useful for the content on your pages, not just for the entities that publish this content.
A consumer (like Google) that offers features making use of this structured data (like rich results) has its own rules for this feature, of course. But even if the consumer would support this feature only for structured data about the author’s own business, this should not stop you from providing the structured data about other businesses.
As a general rule: You provide as much structured data as you can/want, and consumers pick out what they want to use.
To convey that it’s not your own business, you can provide your own LocalBusiness as publisher/author of the WebPage, which is about the other LocalBusiness.
<body typeof="schema:WebPage">
<header property="schema:author schema:publisher" typeof="schema:LocalBusiness">
<h1 property="schema:name">Your own business</h1>
</header>
<article property="schema:about" typeof="schema:LocalBusiness">
<h2 property="schema:name">The other business</h2>
</article>
</body>
Related
I am developing a simple website and want to implement microdata on it.
The website is for a local business and simply has the default structure (about, services, contact, etc..).
My question is if microdata can be cloned on every page or if I should change from page to page. Logically I would say that I should change from page to page, but on the other hand information like facebook page, twitter and map will keep the same so I don't know what should I do.
I take the chance to ask if there is any better category to list a software company, I am using local business but maybe there should be better ones that I am missing (this applies for meta description and keywords also on the different sections of the site)
You should declare only the start- or contact/aboutme site with your Local Buissiness Information.
On all other site depend on the content like article, product etc.
I'm currently developing a back-end for chefs at various restaurants to report their daily menues in a structured format. Of pragmatic reasons have I chosen to use a web CMS and use many of the features already include including a flexible rights-management module
I want to utilise the existing functions in Joomla for access control, editing and navigation, but I need to replace the textfield with five field (each representing one day of the working week) and save this in a structured way into the database. I was planning to create a editor plugin which displays the field for the chef-users and parse the in-data into a structured data-format e.g. XML. For each week I will need to create empty templates for all the restaurants displaying the week number and dates.
I was also hoping for third-party developers to access this data through RESTful methods in the URL where the structure could be something like: http://domain.no/restaurant-name/menu for a text-menu http://domain.no/restaurant-name/json for json etc.
I guess my question is how I can start developing such features. Has there been developed anything similar and are there modules developed for Joomla which I can utilise? Does my approach sounds sensible or are there any other good way of solving my problem?
For a custom content management i would use Zoo component from Yootheme (not free!). You can define your fields,
But for developers access, i have no idea, sorry!
EDIT: I've solved my issues (for now at least).
I've recently been working with the Zendesk REST Api and their use of the custom "X-On-Behalf-Of" header for looking up tickets opened by a particular user got me thinking about Restful Api design choices (in no specific language, more of a how to name URIs question). I've also read this related question on Custom HTTP headers, but it left me with more questions than answers.
Say I have an example restful web service dealing with rental apartment applications where clients use Basic Auth (keep it simple) to authenticate. Define the basic data as such:
Users (can be of type landlord or renter)
Forms (which consist of one or more Document resources and some form meta data like form name and version info)
And then some type of resource corresponding to Rental Applications, which ties together Forms, Applicants (one or more renters), Landlord, and some metadata like status and dates.
I'm struggling to properly model the URIs for the Applications resource in general, and more specifically with respect to a clients role. (assume api root is https://api.example.com/)
How do I allow a Landlord to fetch a list of applications sent to them? My intuition says make a request to "GET /applications" and Basic Auth lets the server know which user to build the list for; likewise "GET /applications" requested by a Renter would return a list of applications they've sent...but I'm not confident this is a solid design in general to mix and match sender vs. recipient lists at the same URI. Should I be thinking about the "/applications" resource differently, and perhaps allowing a hierarchy like "/applications/[USER_IDENTIFIER]" for each user instead?
Also, regardless of my applications URI design, assume a Landlord is able to create an application on behalf of a renter. Is this better accomplished by sending a custom header like "X-Create-On-Behalf-Of: somerenter#example.com" with the PUT/POST creation request? Or should my schema define a field which allows for this alternative scenario.
I'm very much an amateur at this, so I'm open to any criticism of my assumptions/design, as well as any pointers for learning more about designing RESTful api's. Thanks for reading.
I think I've found a solution.
Landlords and Renters are really just subclasses of the same object, which I'll call Party (as in party to a transaction, not birthday party). So then each one has their own resource, named like /party/PARTY_ID.
It's easy to extend this to see that /party/SOME_LANDLORD/applications and /party/SOME_RENTER/applications solve my issues. It also removes my need to consider custom headers.
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I am working on a large project involving creating a worldwide hotel database with rich data such as Addresses, Images, Descriptions, Policies, Coordinates, Facilities, Reviews, Local area descriptions and their amenities etc.
I am looking for a public hotel API where I can both retrieve the data and run (preferably RESTful) real-time queries for specific locations and available rooms, and where I can subsequently let my customers make bookings.
Can anyone share experience, knowledge and possible guidelines for such a project, which APIs are suitable and what are the best practices?
In my search for hotel APIs I have found only one API giving unrestricted open access to their hotel database and allowing you to book their hotels:
Expedia's EAN http://developer.ean.com/
You need to sign for their affiliate program, which is very easy.
You get immediate access to their hotel databases plus you can make availability/booking requests with several response options, including JSON, which is more convenient and lightweight than the (unfortunately) more widespread XML.
As you immediately access their API, you can start developing and testing, but still need their approval to launch the site, basically to make sure it provides the needed quality and security, which is reasonable.
They also offer "deep linking", i.e. you may customize your requests by adding parameters. Then if it sufficient for your purpose (for mine it is not), you don't even need to store their content on your server.
I have also signed for HotelsCombined program:
(link removed as this site doesn't seem to let me put more links)
However, they do not immediately allow you to use their API even for testing. From their answer:
"Apologies for the inconvenience caused, but it’s simply a business decision to limit access to our rich hotel content. Please kindly check back within the next 2-3 months, where we will be able to judge your traffic, and in turn judge your status on standard data feeds."
I have also signed for Booking.com affiliate program:
(link removed as this site doesn't seem to let me put more links)
Unfortunately, again, they limit access, from their answer:
"Please do note that, since there's a high amount of time and cost involved in the XML integration, we are only able to offer the XML integration to a small amount of partners with a high potential."
I did not explore Tripadvisor as they seem only to offer top 10 hotels and only as widgets, but most importantly for me, they wouldn't allow booking through them.
I've checked the hotelbase.org mentioned above, they have very extensive list but not as rich as by Expedia, also they don't seem to have images and don't allow booking either.
I've used the TripAdvisor API before and its suited me well. It returns, per destination, a list of top-rated hotels, along with options to retrieve reviews, photos, nearby restaurants and a couple other useful things.
http://www.tripadvisor.com/help/what_type_of_tripadvisor_content_is_available
From the API page (available API content) :
* Hotel, attraction and restaurant ratings and reviews
* Top 10 lists of hotels, attractions and restaurants in a destination
* Traveler photos of a destination
* Travelers' Choice award badges for hotels and destinations
To expand upon #nstehr's answer, you could also use Yahoo Pipes to facilitate a more granular local search. Go to pipes.yahoo.com and do a search for existing hotel pipes and you'll get the idea..
HotelsCombined has an easy-to-access and useful service to download the data feed files with hotels. Not exactly API, but something you can get, parse and use. Here is how you do it:
Go to http://www.hotelscombined.com/Affiliates.aspx
Register there (no company or bank data is needed)
Open “Data feeds” page
Choose “Standard data feed” -> “Single file” -> “CSV format” (you may get XML as well)
If you are interested in details, you may find the sample Python code to filter CSV file to get hotels for a specific city here:
http://mikhail.io/2012/05/17/api-to-get-the-list-of-hotels/
Update:
Unfortunately, HotelsCombined.com has introduced the new regulations: they've restricted the access to data feeds by default. To get the access, a partner must submit some information on why one needs the data. The HC team will review it and then (maybe) will grant access.
You could probably trying using Yahoo or Google's APIs. They are generic, but by specifying the right set of parameters, you could probably narrow down the results to just hotels. Check out Yahoo's Local Search API and Google's Local Search API
Check out api.hotelsbase.org - its a free xml hotel api
No images as of yet though
Try Tixik.com and their API there. They have a very different data that big players, really good coverage mostly in Europe and good API conditions.
After several days of searching found the EAN API - http://developer.ean.com/ - it is a very big one, but it provides really good information. Free demos, XML\JSON format. Looks good.
I'm designing an api and I'd like to allow users and groups to have saved searches, but am uncertain how to best expose this information. I've come up with a few URI's to expose them:
# These are for CRUD the search definitions, not running the searches
1. /users/{username}/searches # lists the searches for a user
2. /users/{username}/searches/{search-name} # CRUD a specific user search
3. /groups/{groupname}/searches # lists the searches for a group
4. /groups/{groupname}/searches/{search-name} # CRUD a specific group search
5. /searches/{search-id|search-name}
6. /searches/group/{groupname}/{search-name}
7. /searches/user/{username}/{search-name}
I don't feel its right to expose all those URIs. That means there are 2 ways to update or list searches for a user and a group: through the /groups/search, or through /search/group. It also means more to support and I'm afraid that subtle differences would develop.
Searches can be independent records in the database and not tied to a specific user or group (e.g, default system searches, or context-dependent searches).
Because searches can be independent, it feels wrong to expose them as /users/searches and /groups/searches. At the same time, if I'm thinking, "What are bob's searches?" I would first think of /users/bob/searches because, logically, its bob's search. Similarly, if I want to, say, backup bob's account, all his personal information should be under /users/bob.
So, does anyone have advice on which way is preferred, and/or worked well (or poor) for them?
I would tend to stick with
5. /searches/{search-id|search-name}
6. /searches/group/{groupname}/{search-name}
7. /searches/user/{username}/{search-name}
The backup problem can be solved by creating a new resource that contains links to Bob's info throughout the system e.g.
GET /AccountData/Bob
<div class="AccountData">
<link rel="searches" href="/Searches/User/Bob"/>
<link rel="options" href="/Options/User/Bob"/>
<link rel="usagehistory" href="/History/User/Bob"/>
</div>
My experience is that you will drive yourself nuts if you try and create a single hierarchy that meets all of your usage scenarios. You just can't do it. That's why Wikis work so well, they use links instead of hierarchy to provide access to the information.
I would suggest you focus more on what links will be returned in the representations.
e.g.
GET /Groups/{GroupName}
<div class="group">
<div class="name">AGroup</div>
<link rel="searches" href="/Searches/Group/AGroup"/>
</div>
With this approach, you care much less about what the URL structure looks like. As Roy states here
A REST API must not define fixed
resource names or hierarchies (an
obvious coupling of client and server)
I realize this may seem like an extreme position, considering how everyone on SO seem fixated on what your urls need to look like to have a RESTful API, but the more you think about it, the more sense it makes.
P.S. Please don't get hung up on my choice of HTML as a media type for the representations, I'm just drawing attention to the fact that you don't always need to use a custom XML vocabulary.
My tendency would be to divide up into the types of queries (e.g. one type of query is a "list searches" query. Then I'd have arguments. E.g. /searchlist?user=john. Unless you're trying to make this stuff get indexed by bots and search engines, that should work fine.
Search is functionality not resource so you have to not use it in resource URI may be in param, like
/users/{username}?q={query string}
/groups/{groupname}?q={query string}
then for this query string you have 2 options
"RQL" (Resource Query Language)
or
"FIQL" (Feed Item Query Language)