Whilst discussing the proposal for #62 the community group identified a potential issue with our proposed approach for describing use of Facilities.

Discussion of this issue can be seen in the comments on #62 and in this video of a community group meeting.

The issue can be summarised as follows:

• multi-use facilities like Sports Halls can be hired and used in many different ways, some of them mutually exclusive. E.g. hiring the whole hall for a 5-a-side game versus hiring it for 2 badminton matches
• our product centric approach to describing facility use encourages the publication of all possible uses in an RPDE feed.
• at the time that one of the potential configurations is booked, some or all of the other potential uses will not longer be available
• this will trigger a number of updates to the product information shared via RPDE feeds

We decided that the data model being proposed covers the simple cases, e.g. single-use (or primarily single-use) facilities.

We also agreed to proceed with this approach and use implementation feedback to guide whether we might want to change the model or recommend an alternative approach.

Alternative approaches might include:

• exposing details on the potential configurations of multi-use facilities. However so far the group has felt that this is too complex to model and share
• removing (or otherwise limiting) the availability information for these products, requiring consumers to check availability prior to booking. This would remove the churn
• separating out availability updates into separate feeds, similar to Google Reserve

This issue is intended to capture feedback from both publishers and consumers so we can discuss this further when we have real implementation experience.