Possible Implementer of ActivityStreams2

Hi, folks–

In the Tech&Society Domain F2F, Ira was talking about implementation 
interest in ActivityStreams2. At the Web Annotation workshop [1], Jason 
Haag and Tyde Richards of the IEEE Learning Technology Standards 
Committee said that they had a requirements to use AS in their xAPI, 
which a way of storing representations of social actions.

So, if they haven't been active in the discussion, they might be 
interested in hearing your progress, and might be another implementer 
for your testing and implementation report.

Hope that helps!

[1] https://www.w3.org/2014/04/annotation/report.html#Haag-Richards

Regards–
Doug

[[
In the second presentation of the Storage and APIs session, Jason Haag 
(IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee, USA), on behalf of the 
Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative, a US Government learning 
technology research activity, described the Experience API (xAPI), also 
known as the “Tin Can API”, which a way of storing representations of 
social actions; xAPI is based on the ActivityStreams API, which was a 
collaboration between Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and others. Haag gave 
the background on xAPI, which came from the open source community rather 
than a government activity, based on a learning and training technology 
need that goes beyond SCORM. He described xAPI as a RESTful API that 
describes social actions in the triple form [Actor] [Verb] [Object], 
permitting data storage and retrieval not only on formal courses, but on 
experiences and real-world learning, as well as sensor data. He 
indicated use cases including mobile apps, simulators, and virtual 
worlds, both for individuals but for groups. He emphasized the 
readability of the format by both humans and machines. He also described 
the “Learning Record Store“ as another component in the architecture, 
being a triple store that allows for integration with other services and 
analytics. He provided links to more data about xAPI, and indicated 
healthy vendor adoption and activity, including e-learning authoring 
tools. Haag then detailed the background and timeline of the related 
IEEE Actionable Data Book (ADB) R&D activity, proposed by Tyde Richards, 
the chair of the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee; the goal 
was to use EPUB3 not only to enable access to digital books, but also as 
a means of recording and tracking reading and learning activity, 
including annotations, in a distributed way; the first phase was a 
feasibility study, followed by a prototype and implementation phase. 
Haag validated the effort by the positive reaction of the IDPF, and 
signaled IEEE's intent to standardize xAPI. Haag then showed screencaps 
from demos of prototypes of xAPI combined with EPUB3 and Annotator in 
several readers, such as iBooks, Readium, EPUB.js, and Calibre, 
including a demo with embedded video; he followed this with code 
examples of the JavaScript, the Learning Record Store, and the Open 
Annotation data model JSON-LD serialization. Haag expressed interest in 
further experimentation and collaboration with the annotation community, 
and future directions such as widgets and bookmark synchronization 
across platforms and readers, and concluded with a quick comparison of 
data models between xAPI and Open Annotation, including entities such as 
id, actor, object, verb, result, context, timestamp, and attachments. 
Audience follow-ups included comments around collaboration, consensus, 
and statistical data; Frederick Hirsch asked about long-term persistence 
and sustainability of EPUB3, which was fielded by Tyde Richards, who 
contrasting EPUB3 with older digital formats used by the government, 
indicating that with HTML5 as the baseline, even though formats may 
change, there would be improved sustainability.
]]

Received on Wednesday, 23 March 2016 19:47:31 UTC