Bibliographic actions / ActivityActions in schema.org

The subject of the ActivityActions proposal [1] for schema.org was
raised in today's call, with respect to mapping actions to actionable
URIs for common activities around bibliographic data.

Turns out that this proposal _is_ based on activity streams [2], an
effort that I have been tangentially involved with over the last few
years, and which had been focused on publishing data about actions as
they happen (think "<person> <action> <object>", where the verb for
action is always in the past tense). I had published a branch of
Evergreen that published activity streams in the original Atom-based
serialization a while back, which is why this sounded familiar.

However, while the schema.org actions proposal [3] states that they
_will_ address future actions (the actionable URIs we were worried
about), the preamble also notes: 'Addressing "potential" actions is
deferred to a subsequent proposal.' So we have some time before this
becomes a pressing concern, I think.

Those who are interested in pursuing this, though, should probably get
involved with the ActivityActions community and ensure that the list
of actions covers bibliographic needs, earlier rather than later; a
quick glance shows "AddAction", "BorrowAction", "CreateAction",
"DownloadAction", "ListenAction", "PlayAction", "ReadAction",
"RenewAction", "RequestAction", "ReserveAction", "ReturnAction",
"SaveAction", "ViewAction", "WantAction" as likely candidates. (I'm
not sure if printing, emailing, or sending citations via SMS is all
just one variant on "SaveAction" but it might be worth pursuing.)

1. http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/ActivityActions
2. http://activitystrea.ms/
3. http://www.w3.org/wiki/images/6/6a/Actions_in_Schema.org_-_Draft_3.pdf

Received on Wednesday, 17 July 2013 01:53:02 UTC