Re: Actions in Schema.org: target & object properties

Thanks Yaar,

Certainly makes more sense. My only concern is that this approach may generally require domain specific extension of Schema.org.  I'm not sure that's a good or bad thing, however at onset I'm not super comfortable with the approach, only that discovery of DSL extensions can prove to be cumbersome.  My use cases in LR are really not much different than the general internet indexing in that anyone can publish anything… so having more well specified core vocabularies help.

FWIW, as an aside - I have my doubts on the whole Schema.org extension process which just feels haphazard.  To me I just see the flurry of http://schema.org/Action/FubarAction appearing without really understanding how to process the properties.

The other bit with your examples is that I'm tending to disagree with is of the "need" for specialized object.  To me it seems like this specialization make the object more Human readable than Machine readable.  Unfortunately I don't know the full history of how you got this far in the proposal, hence I'm blind to the driving decisions that were made.  But I'd argue that you could have a more generalized action and still accommodate some modifiers.  It wouldn't negate the ability to specialize, I just see a world where extension of Action is a norm if there is not a generic - albeit not perfect - solution available.


On May 16, 2013, at 4:12 PM, Yaar Schnitman <yaar@google.com>
 wrote:

> Jim, you asked about adding "target" and "object" properties to schema.org/Action.
> 
> Taking note of ActivityStrea.ms, we certainly considered adding "target" and "object" to the Schema.org Actions proposal. However, we found that such properties will create problems if our goal is to be able to fully express actions in very precise and unambiguous ways.
> 
> Furthermore, relying on "target" and "object" also becomes a challenge in the case of "potential" actions, where the "target" and "object" might still be missing, since not decided yet.
> 


Not sure this is true… "potential" actions in the context of say a web form:

	AuthenticatedUser (actor) can post (tentative action)  FormX  (object) to SystemY (target)


In a "potential action" use case, the "performer" could be described as the type of permissions needed to execute the action.

All actions must have an object that is being acted upon… it may be inferred in the though the language:

	"Yaar drove."  -- If you drove… you drove some "Thing"… its just not well described, but could be inferred by context.
	"Yaar can drive."  -- Indicates potential driving… the what you can drive is still a "Thing"… 

And really to be honest… I think most people would tend to use Thing.action:

	SnazzyNewWidget.action [ Buy, Bid, Comment, Bookmark, Favorite, Share ]

As I think the larger use case of this vocabulary is I'm searching for "Snazzy New Widget" and the search index returns results with actions to Buy, Bid, Comment, Bookmark, Share, etc...


- JK
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