Proposal talk:Opening hours: standard appointment syntax

reservation:hours instead of this

A bad idea.

In your example with "Fr appointment" one has no idea during which hours one can make an appointment. Maybe I can have a Friday appointment at 23:15.

Maybe the place is open 09:00-17:00 but appointments are required 11:30-14:30. Your idea cannot cope with that.

See also reservation=*. Maybe there's a case for reservation:hours=* to specify days/times when reservations are required or recommended.

--Brian de Ford (talk) 15:39, 8 September 2019 (UTC)

In absence of specific hours “on the store window”, as a mapper it's impossible to know at which hours the business' tenant would be willing to accept an appointment. (E.g. an office might say "Tuesday through Friday 9AM to 5PM. Mondays on appointment.") They might accept appointments at 23:15, they might not.

“open 09:00-17:00 but appointments are required 11:30-14:30”: opening_hours=09:00-11:30,14:30-17:00 || 11:30-14:30 appointment

reservation:hours=* would be a fine alternative. —M!dgard [ talk ] 15:51, 8 September 2019 (UTC)

I do not share the concerns about the reservation not being opening hours. Closed and open should indicate that it is indeed definitely closed/open. We have also unknown for hours, where we definitely don't know. With the appointment we would have a situation where we definitely know that it could be either closed or open. This obviously does not make reservation unnecessary. Maybe a reservation=conditional or something like that would be more accurate for a reservation tag. CamelCaseNick (talk) 19:10, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

Appointment and appointment reservation

The proposal is missing an important point: the time when you can make a reservation maybe different from the time for the appointment itself. The most important time is when you can make the reservation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nospam2005 (talk • contribs) 3 November 2019

We need this

As a regular mapper of shops and amenities, I fully support this proposal and I hope it can be revived. It's quite common to come across opening hours signs that have a day that's "by appointment", and tagging them using a string is time-consuming on a mobile device and looks bad in map apps, particularly since the comment is not translated. By having this keyword in the syntax, maps will be able to understand that a period of time is only by appointment, and display that information correctly when showing POI details.

Looking at values containing the word "appointment" and opening_hours values (and showing the only the values containing a double-quote), the need for a standard is clear. There are hundreds of different ways to express this information, specially since the quoted "comments" are often in their native language, like "na objednávku" or "Termine nach Vereinbarung".

The advantage of this proposal over alternatives discussed a few times (in Talk:Key:opening_hours and on this comment page) is that it maps the reality on the ground: the time periods that are by appointment are part of opening hours signs, not a separate concept, and the details of when the appointment can be booked are never specified and probably assumed to be the POI's opening hours. It might also be possible to make appointments during an amenity's opening hours, but this is not relevant to this proposal which is about periods of time when visits are only possible by appointment.

So I hope this proposal can be put to a vote so that we can update opening_hours parsers if approved. -- Loop120 (talk) 18:22, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

opening_hours=* is unique. This needs to be consulted with https://github.com/opening-hours/opening_hours.js/ first. The syntax is already sophisticated/complicated enough, yet still incomplete in many functionalities.
I don't favor adding new top-level keywords on top of open , closed , and unknown . If it has to be a keyword, it should be generic eg conditioned , to allow mechanisms other than new customer appointments (eg what if it only accepts existing customers?) . I prefer reservation=* / reservation:conditional=* . Another possibility is to overload with opening_hours:conditional=* as @ appointment to be a condition.
—— Kovposch (talk) 12:33, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

It's already there!

Why not define a fixed comment for "by appointment" for every language? This has the positive side effect, that it can be read by normal humans in the country.

opening_hours="by appointment"	only ever open on appointment
opening_hours=Mo-Fr "by appointment"	open only on appointment, appointments only possible on weekdays (without further specification about when the business would accept appointments)
opening_hours=Mo-Fr 09:00-17:00 "by appointment"	open only on appointment, appointments only possible between 9 and 5 on weekdays
opening_hours=Mo-Th 09:00-17:00; Fr "by appointment"	Mo-Th open from 9 to 5, appointment necessary on Friday
opening_hours=Mo-Th 09:00-17:00; Fr 09:00-17:00 "by appointment"	Mo-Th open from 9 to 5, appointment necessary on Friday and only possible between 9 and 5
opening_hours=Mo-Fr 09:00-12:00, Mo-Fr 13:00-17:00 "by appointment"	open without appointment in the morning, appointment necessary in the afternoon
opening_hours=Mo-Fr 09:00-12:00,14:00-17:00, Mo-Fr 12:00-14:00 "by appointment"	open 9 to 5 but appointments are required between noon and 2
opening_hours=Mo-We 09:00-12:00, Th 14:00-17:00, Fr "by appointment" || Th "by appointment"	Monday to Wednesday open from 9 to 12, Thursday regular open from 14:00 to 17:00 and by appointment, Friday only by appointment

You can also look at the German opening hours page, if you need some more advanced examples. Fabi2 (talk) 20:40, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

Glad to see the discussion start anew so quick! I think the goal of this proposal is to define a single keyword for what until now has been a mix of various phrasings and languages, so that it can be parsed or generated programmatically. Look at it from the point of view of a map app that displays POI's opening hours: a user prefers to see the information in their device's language rather than free text in that particular mapper's language. Or on mobile mapping apps that provide easy input of opening hours, which language should be used for the "by appointment" keyword when the mapper taps a hypothetical "by appointment" button?

Probably the proposal should explain the motivations in more details. --Loop120 (talk) 21:00, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

You also can match against the (exact) text in the opening_hours-comment, if and display "by appointment" in the device language of the user. If the appointment e.g. have to made in a special way, e.g only by telephone, this proposal can not be used, so you define a new keyword, that can be only used on a subset of cases. The language for new POI's can be estimated from the position by looking in with country the new, POI is in. Easy input also works with standardized texts for the the "by appointment"-comment and is more flexible. I really enjoy to see how "easy" the app user will input the opening hours of this POI (last rule "|| nach Vereinbarung" is "by appointment"). Fabi2 (talk) 18:18, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

Comments are by definition freeform text. It can't be redefined to something fixed.
—— Kovposch (talk) 05:17, 15 May 2024 (UTC)