Re: ActivityStreams Schema: Hierarchy of Types

> rektide@voodoowarez.com <mailto:rektide@voodoowarez.com>
> 07 November 2014 23:03
> It's highly disappointing to me to see this working group continue
> to run away from the existing vocabulary projects out there and work
> to define it's own vocab. There is so much important work to be done
> surrounding use cases, yet this group is literally back to square 0,
> defining vocabs.
None of this is really defining a new vocabulary. It is renewing a 
vocabulary which already exists 
<https://github.com/activitystreams/activity-schema/blob/master/activity-schema.md>, 
and in fact predates Schema.org. The "actually" interesting things here 
are the extra types introduced between "object" and the more specialized 
types to cover the implicit typing present in AS1.

If one wants to talk of going back to square 0, then bringing up 
schema.org really seems quite silly. After all, the organizations which 
invented Schema.org were heavily involved in ActivityStreams 1.0, 
including the definition of the Avtivity Base Schema.

You cite exclusively Schema.org, which we have excluded for the 
following reasons:

 1. Schema.org is not produced by any standards organization, nor does
    it have any defined open contributor model. While the organizations
    behind Schema.org do accept contributions, they hold veto powers
    over any modifications
 2. Schema.org alone is not sufficient for our use cases
 3. Several of us find the technical quality of Schema.org lacking. The
    design of Schema.org contains numerous things which are illogical
    and badly designed.

>>           + as:Collection
> You don't get json do you? Json is all over your charter. Just use an array.
You clearly have not paid attention to ActivityStreams collections. My 
inbox should not be a JSON array. ActivityStreams collections are paged.

Something, which as far as I can tell, Schema.org doesn't offer
>>           + ...
>>       o as:Group
> Missing. https://schema.org/Organization doesn't quite fit-- too big a concept.
Right. Schema.org is not focused on the social use case. It doesn't 
contain features we need, and it is not extensible. At least, not 
without giving up the key reason to use Schema.org: that it is the one 
core vocabulary for everything.
>> This then gives us a basis for declaring common properties (e.g. a
>> Person doesn't have comments, but all content objects do)
>>
>> Thoughts?
>
> I would like to see this working group work with others and focus on apis
> and use cases for objects, rather than reinventing particular protoforms
> for specfici objects.
We do work with others. We are actively communicating with the 
Annotations WG, with whom we have significant overlap. We are reaching 
out to the various related projects which we feel should be directly 
involved in this work. We have had discussions with Schema.org, and we 
may have some agreement on alignment there (i.e. Schema.org actions and 
ActivityStreams actions should have a 1:1 mapping to each other and 
share a data model, even if they have different names). I'm pretty sure 
we have some informal consensus that vCard and iCalendar will be 
explicitly included in the list of vocabularies to be used with 
ActivityStreams and mapped appropriately.

No vocabulary (besides AS1 plus a couple of extensions) encompasses our 
use case - and some of the vocabulary elements are going to be driven 
directly by the needs of implementing a social protocol.

The core of AS2 is shaping up to be a really nice vocabulary really 
quickly, and the extended portions are things we can easily model based 
upon experience. There are just one or two pieces of the core vocabulary 
which are proving controversial and "bikesheddy".

Hopefully we reach agreement on these soon.

     Owen