Refactoring audience targeting and activity target/origin

I'd like to propose a bit of a breaking change that refactors and
simplifies audience targeting and the use of the target/origin
properties in the vocabulary.

Currently (in AS2 and AS1), we would use the "target" property to
indicate the object to which an activity is *directed*. For instance,
if I wanted to say "Evan added a Photo to his Album", the "target"
property indicates the "his Album".

The "origin" property was just recently (speculatively) introduced as
a way of identifying the object *from* which an activity is directed.
For instance, "Evan moved a photo from Album A to Album B", the
"origin" would specify "Album A", the target would specify "Album B".

With the audience targeting properties, we use "to", "bto", "cc" and
"bcc" to help indicate who should to notified.

What I'd like to propose is collapsing these concepts in order to
simplify the vocabulary overall.

We would rename "target" to "to", deprecating the original name "target"
We would rename "origin" to "from" (no need to deprecate "origin"
since it's new)
We could continue to use "to" for implicit audience targeting (just as
we can use "target" today) but "cc" and "bcc" would become the primary
explicit audience targeting properties.

In other words, if I wanted to say, "Evan moved a photo from Album A
to Album B, please notify Arnaud", it would be:

{
  "actor": "evan@example.org",
  "object": {
    "@type": "Image",
    "url": "http://example.org/abc.png"
  },
  "from": {
    "@type": "Album",
    "displayName": "Album A"
  },
  "to": {
    "@type": "Album",
    "displayName": "Album B"
  },
  "cc": "arnaud@example.org"
}

Semantically this is easier to explain and understand.

It would require a change for folks who currently do audience
targeting using "to" (which is why I'm cc'ing Evan directly to make
sure he sees it) but overall I think the change makes sense and
simplifies the vocabulary overall.

Thoughts?

- James

Received on Sunday, 12 April 2015 16:29:10 UTC