RE: ActivityStreams Schema: Hierarchy of Types

Although I would love to see a reusable vocabulary built with consistent semantics, I don’t see much appetite in the social developer universe for such an undertaking, and so I would tend to agree with Evan on this.  As a reminder, the scope of the IG wrt vocabularies is to catalog existing social vocabularies and identify deficiencies – which one could argue includes developing missing terms.  We have some thoughts on how to go about that, but not yet the resources to actually begin. I don’t see our work as justification for slowing up development of a base vocabulary by the WG.

Best Regards,
Mark

From: Evan Prodromou [mailto:evan@e14n.com]
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2014 9:20 AM
To: public-socialweb@w3.org
Subject: Re: ActivityStreams Schema: Hierarchy of Types

On 2014-11-10 06:54 PM, Harry Halpin wrote:

Also, note that vocabularies in general are in the scope of the Social Interest Group, not the Working Group and we'd expect the Working Group to only adopt the most minimal vocabularies possible needed for its deliverables, with other vocabularies (such as those around profiles) being standardized elsewhere in either the W3C or outside the W3C.
I'm a little concerned about that statement.

Our deliverable is a  JSON-based syntax to allow the transfer of social information, such as status updates, across differing social systems.

I don't think we can have effective interoperability of social software clients and servers if we don't have at least some recommended base vocabulary of social concepts with some kind of reasonable extension mechanism.

So, we should have an easy and recommended way to describe:

  *   entities like people, groups and contact lists
  *   relationships like one-way follow, two-way friending, group membership, list membership
  *   content life cycle [CRUD] for typical content like text, images, audio and video as well as "office files"
  *   and reactions to content like "likes", replies, and re-shares.
Whether that vocabulary is put together from pieces like schema.org, Activity Streams 1.0 base schema, Hydra or SIOC, or if it's generated from whole cloth, is I think an open question.

I also think that for mainstream developers familiar with existing social APIs, there's not a lot of awareness of or patience for distinctions between the syntax and the vocabulary. We should be very careful that what we deliver is functional and usable by typical social software developers.

-Evan