Text value for Schema.org "price" property? - schema.org

I'm working on a piece of structured data, in JSON-LD format (should it matter).
While looking through the price property page of Schema.org, I saw that you can also add text as price value. However, it doesn't seem to be documented anywhere what texts are allowed.
Does anyone know what texts are allowed?
I've tried to fill in random texts while using the Structured Data Testing Tool, but that gave an error that it didn't get recognised.

Schema.org doesn’t restrict (nor document/recommend) what kind of Text value the price property can have.
Most prices will have a Number value, and unless you have a good reason not to use it, you should go with Number, too, following their "Usage guidelines".
I guess possible reasons for expecting Text could be:
CMS that don’t (easily) allow to output the price separately from the currency symbol. Having "5 EUR" as price is better than not providing a price at all.
Authors that want to say "gratis" or "free" instead of "0".

Related

How can I perform automated tests against MS Word documents using PowerShell?

We regularly need to perform a handful of relatively simple tests against a bunch of MS Word documents. As these checks are currently done manually, I am striving for a way to automate this. For example:
Check if every page actually has a page number and verify that it is correct.
Verify that a version identifier in the page header is identical across all pages.
Check if the document has a table of contents.
Check if the document has a table of figures.
Check if every figure has a caption.
et cetera. Is this reasonably feasible using PowerShell in conjunction with a Word API?
Powershell can access Word via its object model/Interop (on Windows, at any rate) and AIUI can also work with the Office Open XML OOXML) API, so really you should be able to write any checks you want on the document content. What is slightly less obvious is how you verify that the document content will result in a particular "printed appearance". I'm going to start with some comments on the details first.
Just bear in mind that in the following notes I'm just pointing out a few things that you might have to deal with. If you're examining documents produced by an organisation where people are already broadly speaking following the same standards, it may be easier.
Of the 5 examples you give, without checking the details I couldn't say exactly how you would do them, and there could be difficulties with all of them, but for example
Check if every page actually has a page number and verify that it is correct.
Difficult using either OOXML or the object model, because what you would really be checking is that the header for a particular section had a visible { PAGE } field code. Because that field code might be nested inside other fields that say "if don't display this field code", it's not so easy to be sure that there would be a page number.
Which is what I mean by checking the document's "printed appearance" - if, for example, you can use the object model to print to PDF and have some mechanism that lets PS inspect the PDF's content, that might be a better approach.
Verify that a version identifier in the page header is identical across all pages.
Similar problem to the above, IMO. It depends partly on how the version identifier might be inserted. Is it just a piece of text? Could it be constructed from a number of fields? Might it reference Document Properties or Variables, or Custom XML content?
Check if the document has a table of contents.
Perhaps enough to look for a TOC field that does not have certain options, such as a \c option that a Table of Figures would contain.
Check if the document has a table of figures.
Perhaps enough to check for a TOC field that does have a \c option, perhaps with a specific parameter such as "Figure"
Check if every figure has a caption.
Not sure that you can tell whether a particular image is "a Figure". But if you mean "verify that every graphic object has a caption", you could probably iterate through the inline and floating graphics in the document and verify that there was something that looked like a Word standard caption paragraph within a certain distance of that object. Word has two standard field code patterns for captions AFAIK (one where the chapter number is included and one where it isn't), so you could look for those. You could measure a distance between the image and the caption by ensuring that they were no more than a predefined number of paragraphs apart, or in the case of a floating image, perhaps that the paragraph anchoring the image was no more than so many paragraphs away from the caption.
A couple of more general problems that you might have to deal with:
- just because a document contains a certain feature, such as a ToC field, does not mean that it is visible. A TOC field might have been formatted as not visible. Even harder to detect, it could have been formatted as colored white.
- change tracking. You might have to use the Word object model to "accept changes" before checking whether any given feature is actually there or not. Unless you can find existing code that would help you do that using the OOXML representation of the document, that's probably a strong case for doing checks via the object model.
Some final observations
for future checks, perhaps worth noting that in principle you could create a "DocumentInspector" that users could call from Word BackStage to perform checks on a document. Not sure you can force users to run it, or that you could create it in PS, but perhaps a useful tool.
longer term, if you are doing a very large number of checks, perhaps worth considering whether you could train a ML model to try to detect problems.

The Error I see when I try to assign more than 6 elements to a tag of type RefGUIDList

I have a query in MGD technology regarding a tagged value of Type “RefGUIDList”.
I am using MDG technology in which I am giving the tagged value of type “RefGUIDList”, which should refer to maximum number(multiplicity 0-n) of elements. But in MDG it is not able to refer more than 6 elements.
The error I see when I try to assign more than 6 elements to a tag of type RefGUIDList.
Please tell me is there any way to increase the count of the references or let me know is there any other tagged value for referring maximum number of elements.
You could tweak you database schema for t_objectproperties.value so they can hold more chars. But this is absolutely on your own risk. Some people have done so with different char fields. But you should first try in a sandbox to find out if it works without side effects. And of course you won't get much support from Sparx if something fails.
Alternatively you could send in a feature request. Postal address: Santa Claus, North Pole.

A way of describing both setup price and ongoing price in schema.org services

So i'm setting up my ld+json structured data, using Schema.org schemas. I am adding products with Offers but they only have a single price parameter.
I also looked at PriceSpecification too, but there is only "range" and "price".
Should I use 2 PriceSpecifications (or 2 Offers?) with visibly different names, or is there another option I haven't come across? Don't want search engines to get confused.
Thanks for any help.
You can use multiple PriceSpecifications. However "typically, only the subclasses of this type are used for markup." UnitPriceSpecification would be the best fit, or the setup price can be of type DeliveryChargeSpecification.
Alternatively, you can use a single CompoundPriceSpecification with multiple priceComponent properties, each of type UnitPriceSpecification. "The name property of the attached unit price specification for indicating the dimension of a price component"

Why does the "availability" property point back to a page on schema.org?

I’m trying to use the availability property and I don’t understand why you would want to point it back to a page on schema.org like the following:
<link itemprop="availability" href="http://schema.org/InStock"/>Available today
Schema.org’s availability property expects a value of the type ItemAvailability.
ItemAvailability is an Enumeration type which has several "enumeration members" that you can find on the bottom of the page (Discontinued, InStock etc.).
Using such an enumeration member has the advantage that data consumers can "understand" your item availability, because these URIs have defined meanings. If everyone would use free text, it would be way harder (or even impossible) for data consumers to make use of this property.
Note that you don’t have to use these pre-defined enumeration members. You could even come up with your own set of URIs. See their blog post Schema.org markup for external lists.

Complex URL handling conception

I'm currently struggling at a complex URL handling concept question. The application have a product property database table/collection with all the different product types (i.e. categories, colors, manufacturers, materials, etc.).
{_id:1,alias:"mercedes-benz",type:"brand"},
{_id:2,alias:"suv-cars",type:"category"},
{_id:3,alias:"cars",type:"category"},
{_‌​id:4,alias:"toyota",type:"manufacturer"},
{_id:5,alias:"red",type:"color"},
{_id:6,alias:"yellow",type:"color"},
{_id:7,alias:"bmw",type:"manufacturer"},
{_id:8,alias:"leather",type:"material"}
...
Now the mission is to handle URL requests in the style below in every(!) possible order to retrieve the included product properties. The only allowed character is the dash (settled SEO requirement, some properties also can include dashes by themselve - i think also an important point - i.e. the category "suv-cars" or the manufacturer "mercedes-benz"):
http:\\www.example.com\{category}-{color}-{manufacturer}-{material}
http:\\www.example.com\{color}-{manufacturer}
http:\\www.example.com\{color}-{category}-{material}-{manufacturer}
http:\\www.example.com\{category}-{color}-nonexistingproperty-{manufacturer}
http:\\www.example.com\{color}-{category}-{manufacturer}
http:\\www.example.com\{manufacturer}
http:\\www.example.com\{manufacturer}-{category}-{color}-{material}
http:\\www.example.com\{category}
http:\\www.example.com\{manufacturer}-nonexistingproperty-{category}-{color}-{material}
http:\\www.example.com\{color}-crap-{manufacturer}
...
...so: every order of the properties should be allowed! The result have to be the information about the used properties per URL-Request (BTW yes, the duplicate content will be fixed by redirects and a predefined schema). The "nonexistingproperties"/"crap" are possible and just should be ignored.
UPDATE:
Idea 1: One way i'm thinking about the question is to split the query string by dashes and analyze them value by value, the problem: At the two or three or more word combinations at some properties there are too many different combinations and variations so a loooot of queries which kills this idea i think..
Idea 2: The other way is to build a (in my opinion) too large Alias/URL-Table with all of the different combinations, but i think that's just an ugly workaround. There are about 15.000 of different properties so the count of the aliases in the different sort orders is killing this idea.
Idea 3: It's your turn! Thanks for your mind and your time.
While your question is a bit broad, below are some ideas. There isn't a single awesome answer unless you find a free or commercial engine for this that works exactly the way you want.
The way I thought about your problem was to consider the URL as a list of keywords.
use Lucene as a keyword/tag system. It's good at the types of searches you suggest you want, including phrases, stems, etc.
store and index the data in DB of choice, but pull the keywords into memory and build a bit index of all keywords vs items. Iterate through the keyword table producing weighted results. If order of keywords matters, you'll also need make a pass through the result set to weight based on word order. These types of searches always need to cap their result set quickly in order to return results quickly.
cache the results like crazy from working matches, and give precedence to results that users seem to click on the most for a given URL.
attack the database by using tag indexes in MongoDB. You'd still need to merge and weight results. Very intensive and not likely a good use of DB resources.
read some of the academic papers on keyword searches. It's a popular topic.
build a table of words that have dashes in them, and normalize/convert those before running your queries
always check for full exact matches first
The only way this may work, if you restrict all property values to be unique. So, you make a set of categories+colors+manufacturers, etc. All values have to be unique. This will allow you to find to what property the value belongs.
The data structure for this should be fairly simple:
{_id:ValueOfTheProperty, Property:TypeOfProperty}
Here are some possible samples:
{ _id: Red, Property: Color }
{ _id: Green, Property: Color }
{ _id: Boots, Property: Category }
{ _id: Shoes, Property: Category }
...
This way, the order does not matter, and you are able to convert them in a single pass to a map:
{ Color: Red, Category: Boots }
Though, I predict some problems with ambigous names here.