Re: ActivityStreams Schema: Hierarchy of Types

While I certainly agree that a vocabulary of this sort will be
necessary (let's call it the "Social Object Vocabulary" to
differentiate it from the "Activity Vocabulary"), this becomes a very
slippery path... if we're not careful, we'll just end up rehashing the
same ground covered by other efforts (vcard, foaf, schema.org, org
ontology, etc). As much as possible, we ought to be looking at these
existing vocabularies before attempting to hash out anything else.

For instance, we simply don't need an as:Person when we already have
things like foaf:Agent, schema.org/Person, vcard:Individual,
prov:Agent, and likely many others. One thing that would likely help
is to start documenting the abstract generalized concepts then mapping
those to the existing vocabularies, we can then see where the gaps
exist. I've started working on that here:

https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg/Social_Vocabulary

- James

On Tue, Nov 4, 2014 at 12:58 PM, Owen Shepherd <owen.shepherd@e43.eu> wrote:
> As I work on the proposed spec which I'll be submitting imminently as a
> basis for our social API, it occurs to me that we really ought to (A) work
> out our base types (as Evan brought up earlier this week), and (B) work our
> our classification system.
>
> I figure that we have three broad groups of Objects:
>
> "Actors" - people, robots, etc. The "users" of our social system, whether
> sentient or not.
> "Content objects" - notes, articles, videos, etc. These are "passive"
> objects - they can only be created and acted on by the previous
>
> With "Media" as a subclass for things like videos and audio, which share a
> common property set
>
> "Other" - Things like groups, which don't really fall into either of the two
> previous categories
>
> This gives us an ontology somewhat like this (where each indent level
> implies a subclass relationship)
>
> as:Object - Base type
>
> as:Actor?
> A "producer"/"consumer" in AS ontology
>
> as:Person - A human being
> Others for "bots"?
>
> as:<Something> (Content objects; This is kind of like what Tantek would call
> a post)
> Can have things like comments, list of people who like, etc
>
> as:Note - shortform text (e.g. a tweet)
> as:Article - longform text
> as:Media(Object?) - Various types of multimedia (all share common
> properties)
>
> as:Audio
> as:Video
> as:Image
> ...
>
> as:Location
> as:Collection
> ...
>
> as:Group
>
> This then gives us a basis for declaring common properties (e.g. a Person
> doesn't have comments, but all content objects do)
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Owen

Received on Wednesday, 5 November 2014 05:17:16 UTC