This is my response to The London Assembly Health and Public Services Committee‘s consultation on an open data standard for information about public toilets [Googe Docs link]. Try not to giggle at the back — this is good stuff, and of great usefulness: imagine a mobile app which can tell you where the nearest open public toilet is, in the evening; or the nearest with ease of access, if you’re a wheelchair user; or the nearest which is free, if you have no change. And no, I don’t live in London, but this standard should be usable everywhere, in the UK or overseas.

I propose using the vCard standard for contact information exchange, noting the forthcoming v4 revisions. For example:

Name of building / park / location

Use vCard properties (“street-address”, “locality”, “region”, “country-name”) .

Postcode

Use vCard “postal-code” property. Do not restirct to the 8-character UK standard, without checking that this will work for overseas postcodes.

Unique identifier

Should be a URI; or at least be capable of being resolved to one.

Latitude/ Longitude

Specify that these are in WGS84, as used by vCard and common mapping services (other, incompatible, coordinate schema exists).

Easting/ Northing

Redundant (or computable) if coordinates used. Not available in vCard. If both are allowed, need to specify which has precedence in case of inconsistency.

Owner

Use vCard “agent” property, including postal address properties. Alternatively, have a singe URI to a separate vCard record for the owner.

Gender, children, RADAR, other multi-choice properties

Use the vCard “category” property, which is plural, with an agreed vocabulary, where absence means no; alternatively have the vocabulary include negative values, and assume absence to mean “not known”.

Is it inside a shop / café / pub?

Use the vCard “category” property, with an agreed vocabulary, applied to the owner.

Opening hours

Use the proposed model, inside the vCard “note” property. Watch for emerging “opening hours” schema elsewhere.

And move all free-text options to the vCard “note” property, which is plural, using a prefix to distinguish them.

If the use of vCard is not possible, I would still mirror vCard properties and property-names as closely as possible, especially for addresses, in order to ensure ease of interoperability.

I am happy to elaborate on these points if that would be helpful.

Disclosure: I’m a contributor to the v4 vCard revisions.

Update: At the request of staff from The London Assembly, I’ve updated their Google Doc (linked above), mapping fields to the vCard standard.