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Hi Ben,
see inline comments:
On 19.10.2010, at 22:51, Ben Dougall wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Regarding using GoodRelations to specify opening times data. Would  
> the following work, or not, could anyone tell me please?
>
> Emit from a webpage two main types of opening times blocks of data  
> at the same time:
>
> 1. A weekly, Mon-Sun normal opening times (as demonstrated in the  
> example here: http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelationsQuickstart#Shop.2C_Restaurant.2C_or_Store.2C_and_Opening_Hours) 
>  -- that is Mon-Sun (or Mon-Sat if closed days aren't to be  
> specified) without any dates so to be applied indefinitely.

1. Closed days do not need to be specified, since the type of promise  
(assurance) behind an opening hour plate is usually that the shop will  
be open at a certain time, not that it will be closed (you will be  
surprised if the shop is closed but said to be open, but there is no  
promise that the shop will ever be closed).

2. If you make a statement on opening hours without specifying the  
validity, you simply don't tell any agent (human or software) when  
this promise will be valid. This is better than nothing, but an agent  
will have to guess whether that statement will hold on a given day.

As already explained, a rational agent will look at opening hour info  
without explicit validity if no opening hour info with explicit  
validity for the respective day is found. But the reliability is  
lower, so if a customer has the choice between two stores, and one is  
said to be open with a validity statement, it would be logical to go  
to that store rather than to another one without validity info.

So it is always better to specify validity, in particular since that  
is easy to achieve in dynamic Web applications.

>
> 2. A day with a specific date range (a date range which covers just  
> that one day) with different to the normal opening times, using this  
> kind of code:
>        <div property="gr:validFrom" content="2010-10-10T00:00:00Z"  
> datatype="xsd:dateTime"></div>
>        <div property="gr:validThrough"  
> content="2010-10-10T23:59:59Z" datatype="xsd:dateTime"></div>

Your proposed approach should work, but again, it would be better (and  
not utterly difficult) to implement explicit validity intervals,  
because you can update / revoke previously published data easily - no  
need to tell anybody (except for changing the lastmod attribute in  
your sitemap.xml); clients and crawlers should use the latest version  
of your data.
>
> The idea being that the day's opening times specified with the  
> specific date range would over-ride its day's standard times. This  
> seems the most logical way to do it but I've yet to find out if it'd  
> be illegal according to GR's rules, or legal but not a good idea, or  
> absolutely fine, or what? I have no idea if it'd work or not. Would  
> it?
It's legal, yet not ideal. So if this is what you can implement now,  
implement that. It will be 1000 times better than trying any other way  
of exposing opening hours.
>
> Another question: is there a way to specify "closed"?
No, see the argument above.

>
> Thanks, Ben.
>
>
Best
Martin

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