Social Web F2F recap

Randall, Frederick, and I had the privilege of representing the
Annotation WG at the Social WG face-to-face (and a day or so of
IndieWebCamp) a few weeks back in Cambridge, MA.

Here's a quick rundown of my take-aways along with some highlights
based on the March 18th call where Frederick represented his set of
take-aways--which match mine, fwiw. :)


Our objective at the F2F was to represent the Annotation WG within the
Social WG's considerations for their API, data format, and
notifications protocol discussions.

Core take aways:
 - The ActivityStreams 2.0 format is JSON-LD preferred, but not required
   - this matches the Annotation WG's current plan
   - they offer a set "magic strings" (key names) for those who want
to ignore the @context
 - Their "activities" are extensible, with some for Note, Comment, Reply, etc.
   - there are as yet no "shipping" implementors of AS2.0 (though
there are some spec implementations).
   - the extensibility mechanisms are defined, but (due to the lack of
implementations) unexplored
   - however, thanks to JSON-LD and the Social WG's eye toward making
these extensible, we should be fine--but should also engage and
explore further
 - There is an AS2.0 Test Suite to be developed:
http://www.w3.org/Social/track/issues/8
   - having that should make extensibility testing easier
   - having something like this for our work, would also be helpful
 - Their API discussions are still formative
   - 3 major contenders are on the table:
     - Micropub (from IndieWeb)
     - LDP (also being considered by the Annotation WG)
     - pump.io API (which is currently based on AS1.0 work)
   - they are currently exploring all 3 against their list of use
cases and building a comparison matrix
 - Federation protocols were demoed on the second day
   - Webmention and Micropub from some IndieWebCamp folks
   - LDP from Andrei at the W3C
 - They plan to compare these federation notes alongside the API notes
   - currently they're keeping the conversations separate and focusing
on API first
   - but with an eye toward how the API should be prepped for federation
 - Of the demos, LDP was the most complete
   - however, the demos were currently tied pretty tightly to
WebID+TLS (WebIDAuth)
   - WebIDAuth while promising, has a *terrible* user
experience...because browsers don't (currently?) care about personal
certificate management UX...
 - LDP still seems like the strongest candidate for the Annotation WG
 - fixed URls and "follow your nose" APIs were also hotly discussed
   - with "follow your nose" winning by a...nose. ;)
 - bringing more "follow your nose" discovery to our protocol docs
would be a Good Thin
g

>From the March 18th call, I highlighted the following:
"<fjh> discussed with Tantek, we might consider interop among the
different approaches, something to think about"

"shepazu: as long as there's a mapping between the simple social-web
+1 and the web annotations +1 ... then we're OK"

"fjh: ... as long as we can interop we're OK"

Beyond the LDP, micropub, pump.io, or other protocol or data model
concerns, I think interop between these groups will likely look like
making sure we can transform data and actions between our various
systems and have the core experience and data survive.

Hopefully that's helpful overview. I'd be happy to answer specific
questions as needed.

Hypothesis has also joined the Social Web WG, so I'm working to track
those activities more closely now as well.

Thanks for the time!
Benjamin
--
Developer Advocate
http://hypothes.is/

Received on Wednesday, 8 April 2015 12:58:10 UTC