Second Candidate: Tourism Accommodation and Heritage Models from SEGITTUR

The Candidates repository has its second entry: edint-turismo, 11 models covering tourism accommodation (hotels, guest houses, aparthotels) and historical/cultural resources (fortified palaces, amphitheatres, aqueducts), translated from the EDINT Tourism repository. You can browse both candidates now on the search page.

If you missed it, the first post explains what the Candidates repository is and why it exists. This second entry is a good illustration of exactly the kind of situation it’s meant to surface.

A repository that isn’t the ontology

The EDINT Tourism repository doesn’t actually contain an ontology — its own README says it “only includes usage examples.” The real vocabulary lives externally: SEGITTUR’s Core Tourism Ontology, a reference model for Spain’s future Intelligent Destination Platform, with 388 classes, real SHACL constraints, and dozens of controlled vocabularies. The EDINT repository demonstrates a thin, deliberately narrow slice of it — 11 classes, backed by real open-data records from Aragón, Castilla y León, Gijón, Alcalá de Henares and Segovia. This candidate translates exactly that slice, not the other 377 classes SEGITTUR’s ontology defines.

What we found inside SEGITTUR’s own ontology

Translating from real, formal ontologies has a side effect: it surfaces inconsistencies that are easy to miss when a model is only ever read by humans. A few worth mentioning:

• Rating is defined three incompatible ways in the same ontology. The formal class definition uses ratingUnit/ratingValue (matching every real example we found — “stars” / “3”); the ontology’s own SHACL shapes instead define bookingValue, googleReviewValue and tripAdvisorValue as separate float fields; and the SHACL shape for Hotel specifically adds a fourth pattern, a flat stars integer. None of the real data uses either of the SHACL variants. We followed the real data.
• Several property and class names in the repository’s own example files don’t match the ontology they claim to use: numberOfAccomodationUnits should be numberOfAccommodationUnits, offersAccommodationRateType should be typeOfAccommodationRate, and the historical-resource classes Amphiteatre and Acueduct should be Amphitheatre and Aqueduct. We corrected these against the authoritative ontology while keeping the real recorded values.
• hasBookingChannel is used directly on a Hotel instance in the ontology’s own documentation example — but its formally declared domain doesn’t actually include Hotel’s superclass chain. A genuine domain/usage mismatch in the source, not something we introduced.

All of this is recorded in the candidate’s standard-metadata.yaml, exactly so nobody has to rediscover it.

What still needs checking

This one carries a higher duplication risk than our first candidate, and we’re saying so plainly rather than waiting for someone else to notice: Smart Data Models already has official SmartDestinations and PointOfInterest domains, and this candidate almost certainly overlaps with models that already exist there. We did not check before publishing this candidate — that overlap check is the single most useful thing anyone could do next, before any of these eleven models go further.

As with the first candidate: real examples, corrections, and comments are welcome via pull request or issue on standards/edint-turismo.