Proposal to add more URLs for Social media, guidance and other information per service
OR UK is limited to one website field for service. Services have fliers, directions, social media platforms and other information to share. We think having dedicated fields will help with the collection of more useful information for the consumers. There is no point saying technically it is possible as we need people to be adding this information as they are prompted to.
Hmm. Specific fields does encourage directories to support specific options, but the cleaner approach is to support service links with a type (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flier, Directions) populated from a taxonomy (or, less elegantly, from an enumeration).
It would be up to service directory software to decide how it prompts for these. It could show a separate input field for each main type although the results will all go in the same part of the data structure.
Does this data always apply to a whole service or does it sometimes apply to a specific scheduled instance?
(Flagged for review in the next version.)
The ‘specific field’ v the ‘ability to add a fields of a type’ is an interesting debate.
To be honest i would take the data format that included the ability to add several links with a defined type. i would then make my collection software collected it.
However, I couldn’t guarantee that other collectors would do that and so aggregating across endpoints becomes difficult.
I was hoping that Open Referral would provide the data format and the UK ‘application’ of this would be to a consistent standard so that we could have consistency across endpoints and aggregation becomes more useful.