Re: Can ActivityPub be used for W3C Annotations?

> The fact that Annotations was released by W3C before AcivityStreams/Pub
were released makes me curious to know if there is some reason for this.
What's the history?

Bob, the Web Annotation WG was concurrent with SocialWG (and Solid IG) and
in general they all co-evolved.

At one point the Web Annotation WG was blocked on the deliverables of
SocialWG, because SocialWG charter had to be extended to get to consensus.
iirc, during that time, technically Web Annotation docs went TR first while
the Social WG had more work to do, but I wouldn't read too much into the
exact final TR dates.

tbt
https://www.w3.org/Search/Mail/Public/search?type-index=public-socialweb&index-type=t&keywords=%22Activity+Streams+and+Annotations%22&search=Search

I definitely had always assumed people would mixin the AS2 and OA vocabs
together as needed.
Here is an old hack where I did this when converting my kindle annotations
to JSON-LD
https://github.com/gobengo/kindle-web-annotations/tree/master#usage
But that was long enough ago I referred to `as:title` and `as:author` which
are from as1 <https://activitystrea.ms/specs/json/1.0/>, and were (to my
chagrin as an implementor at work at the time) renamed near the end of the
WG to 'as:name' and 'as:attributedTo'.

> However, note that "plain JSON", "ActivityStreams native" parsers will
ignore anything that they don't understand.

If there's an as2 parser that drops unknown jsonld, then it's an as2 parser
that doesn't support parsing extensions to the vocabulary. I don't consider
that an ActivityStreams native parser.


On Tue, Feb 28, 2023 at 3:46 PM Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us> wrote:

> Yes, it is clear that since W3C Annotations can be encoded as JSON-LD,
> they should be valid extensions, however, I'm wondering if there is
> something about Annotations that has caused them to be ignored or
> overlooked by the ActivityStreams community. The fact that Annotations was
> released by W3C before AcivityStreams/Pub were released makes me curious to
> know if there is some reason for this. What's the history?
>
> Annotations provide a general framework for making "statements about
> another object," or meta-statements. The Activity Vocabulary includes
> several such meta-statements. These include. at least: Dislike, Flag, Like,
> and Reject. There is also the inReplyTo property. It seems to me that all
> of these could have been expressed as Annotations in a simpler Activity
> Vocabulary. Was an explicit decision made to not do this, or was there some
> explicit reason for not leveraging Annotations?
>
> bob wyman
>
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 28, 2023 at 5:57 PM Abdullah Tarawneh <a@trwnh.com> wrote:
>
>> Seems reasonable, yes. The way to do extensions in ActivityStreams is
>> generally to use other contexts and vocabularies with JSON-LD. However,
>> note that "plain JSON", "ActivityStreams native" parsers will ignore
>> anything that they don't understand. see as2-core section 5,
>> "extensibility":
>> https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/#extensibility
>>
>>>