Best way to identify a 24-hour hotline?

[monfresh]

There is a need to be able to identify a phone number as being a 24/7 hotline. In terms of querying the data from an app like Ohana API, it would be best if this definition was standardized and fixed.

Options I can think of:

• Add it as a "type" option. If by default, all hotlines are 24/7, then a simple hotline type would do.
• Add a new boolean hotline field to the Phones table.

Thoughts?

[spara]

I want to avoid using sematically loaded terms such as 'hotline'. Enumerations such voice, fax, and tty are OK because they refer to a particular technology.

I think that there is a phone_hours field to specify when the phones are manned.

I feel that particular terms such as hotline should be addressed at implementation rather than at the level of a general standard.

[monfresh]

From what I've seen so far (DC and SMC data), the phone_hours field is either not used or is redundant, because a phone number is associated with either a location or a service, both of which have their own hours field.

Furthermore, using the phone_hours field to denote a 24/7 hotline would still require standardization of the text. If I want to find all 24/7 hotlines in the database, or see if a particular service has a hotline number, I would need to be able to query on something unique.

[spara]

Up to user to add hotllne enumeration in datapackage.json

[monfresh]

This is actually already available in both the spec and Ohana API. In the Phones table, the number_type field has several different possible values, and hotline is one of them. View them all here: https://github.com/codeforamerica/ohana-api/wiki/Populating-the-Postgres-database-from-OpenReferral-compliant-CSV-files#phonescsv-required