RE: Comparing Activity Streams / Schema.org / Hydra (former: 'Fwd: Schema.org applies W3C Patent Policy')

On 2 Sep 2014 at 23:34, James M Snell wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 2:07 PM, Sam Goto wrote:
>>>> The approaches that schema.org/Actions and AS2 Actions take differ in
>>>> a number of fairly obvious ways.
>> 
>> Could you enumerate the most significant ways you think they differ
>> (from a technical perspective)? That might be a good starting point to a
>> constructive discussion. 
> 
> The differences are mostly in syntax, but some in model.
> schema.org/Actions tends to define the Actions semantically.. that is,
> "WatchAction", "ViewAction", etc. The AS2 Action Handlers spec, on the
> other hand, defines things like "HttpAction", "ViewAction" (where View
> here effectively means opening a browser). It's a subtle difference
> but it does an an effect on how the JSON is processed. The effect is
> that in the AS2 approach, there is a bit more separation between the
> Verb identifier and the Action descriptions themselves, but not much.

[...]
 
> 1. For any piece of content, we need the ability to include a
> declarative description of one or more potential actions an agent can
> take with that content (the ability to define multiple actions per
> object is important).
> 
> 2. For each potential action, we need the ability to include one or
> more declarative descriptions of how an agent can go about performing
> those actions.
> 
> 3. Ideally, the way we describe the Actions will be consistent with the
> way we describe the Objects (that is, use the same core vocabulary
> model).
> 
> So, in other words, take an object like a Note, for instance. We need
> to be able to say things like, "You can Like, Share or Save this
> note". If you want to "Save" it, here are one or more ways you can do
> that. The "one or more ways" would involve either: (a) calling a REST
> API, (b) opening a browser view, (c) showing some embedded content or
> (d) calling out to some external application. It's important that, as
> part of the description of these options, any given object can have
> multiple actions defined and that each action can have multiple ways
> of accomplishing the action defined.

And that "calling out to some external application" needs to be specified in detail I guess, right?

[...]
 
> Hydra may also provide a solution to this problem. But, to be honest, I
> haven't looked at it in depth yet. From what I have seen, I do not
> believe that we actually need most of what Hydra currently defines. So
> if we opted down that path, we'd have to identify some relevant subset.

Yeah, we try to simplify the creation of Web APIs in general. Here, we are more interested in a specific application domain so indeed some of Hydra's features might be irrelevant in this context.

Btw. if you (or anyone else) has questions regarding Hydra (which wouldn't be too surprising given the current spec state), feel free to ask them here or over at public-hydra@w3.org. I'll do my best to answer them.


Thanks,
Markus


--
Markus Lanthaler
@markuslanthaler

Received on Wednesday, 3 September 2014 22:05:47 UTC