Dusk: The Unifying Language for the Vacation Rental Industry
A domain-specific language (DSL) is a programming language with a higher level of abstraction optimized for a specific class of problems and uses the concepts and rules from the field or domain. It’s meant to be used by industry participants who are knowledgeable in the domain the DSL addresses rather than meant to be used as a more general programming language.
Dusk is a domain-specific knowledge representation language to describe real-estate properties and their rental conditions. As a unifying language, it allows our industry to communicate more efficiently without wasting resources translating from one language to another when communicating and sharing listing and booking data. To succeed in being a unifying language, the DSL needs to be simple and yet expressive enough to cover everything that our industry may want to express.
The intention behind Dusk is for it to be:
Collaborative and Industry-Driven
Rather than being yet another "standard" produced by just one entity and hardly adopted by any other entity, Dusk is the result of a collaboration between multiple entities in our industry, committed to creating a standard that suits their needs and adopting it to enjoy its benefits.
General and Simple
Dusk is capable of expressing a very wide array of rate rules, cancellation rules and other rules that are relevant in a vacation rental context, but its generality does not result in a more complex language.
Standards-Compatible
Dusk adopts widely used standards for representing dates, currencies, and languages. This eases the adoption of Dusk itself since libraries for the widely used standards are easier to find and use.
Legacy-Compatible and Future-Proof
By focusing on the semantics of the abstract data types for the representation of properties and not on the syntactic details, Dusk is both past and future-compatible. The data can be written in XML, JSON or any other syntactic format. It can be stored in a database, in a smart contract on-chain or using a decentralized off-chain storage solution. It can be served through a traditional REST API endpoint, through a GraphQL query or through `web3.js` call to a view function in a contract. The popularity of these different technologies will rise and fall with time, and new technologies will appear, but Dusk's data types will endure because they focus on inherent information about properties.
The data types include information about rates and rate rules (discounts and surcharges, taxes, fees), cancellation rules, availability and availability rules, house rules, and descriptions of the property's characteristics (including photos and videos). Nite Interfaces: Gateways to Enhanced Data Control
Nite Interfaces are applications (apps) and decentralized applications (dApps) that will use the Nite Protocol and offer an onramp for their users to the Protocol. Doing so will give vacation rental operators increased ownership and control over their data instead of the data being siloed on a specific platform as it is today. Any existing or new business can adopt the Nite Protocol and create a Nite Interface to interact with the protocol.
The first Nite Interface to the Nite Protocol is Dtravel Direct, the first project to validate the protocol. The path for operators to onboard and use the Nite Protocol via Dtravel Direct is the following:
Supply managers (i.e. PMSs and Channel Managers) connect to Dtravel Direct
Operators (i.e., Property managers, owners, and hosts) onboard to Dtravel Direct and create a digital wallet
Operators provide read-only access via their supply managers
Operators select payment types and networks
Operators deploy their Nite Protocol smart contracts on their preferred network
Operators activate crypto payments and get a crypto checkout option on their existing direct booking website
Operators receive crypto for bookings, and the traveler has the option to claim the Nites, or it’s held in the property manager’s wallet on behalf of the traveler
All transaction data is recorded on-chain
Once a property manager or owner is onboarded to Dtravel Direct, a traveler will simply see a crypto checkout option on a property manager's existing direct booking website.
In the future, there will be other Nite Interfaces that allow property managers and connectivity partners to onboard to the Nite Protocol.
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