Actions in Schema.org and ActivityStrea.ms

Multiple people commented about the relationship of ActivityStrea.ms and
Schema.org. We discussed Actions with various ActivityStrea.ms contributors
as the proposal evolved. Here is a summary

Schema.org actions focus on being able to fully and precisely describe an
action, so it can be understood and executed reliably in a distributed
system. ActivityStrea.ms is focused on the aggregation of actions into long
streams, and focuses less on the preciseness of the actions themselves.

Therefore, in schema.org, verbs are 1st class types with modifiers that can
precisely express nuances about the action. In addition,
schema.orgstandardizes of the list of common actions and their
properties.

Here are some thoughts of how ActiviyStrea.ms & Schema.org Actions could
play along:

1. Surely the schema.org/Action type needs some extra properties to line up
with ActivityStrea.ms. For example, "provider". This is trivial to do.

2. ActivityStrea.ms's "verb" property could line up with the "type"
property of the action. For instance. I think this is achievable, and one
idea is that just like ActivityStrea.ms may use schema.org for objects
(e.g. http://schema.org/Movie), it can use schema.org types for verbs (e.g.
http://schema.org/ViewAction).

3. Unlike ActivityStrea.ms, schema.org Actions don't have common "object"
and "target" properties. This is intentional (reasoning will follow shortly
in another thread). Instead, each action sub-type has its own named, typed
properties. There is actually an effort in ActivityStrea.ms to standardize
which verb/object/target combinations go together. If there is a strong
need, we can also standardize to which schema.org action type and its
properties these combinations map too.

These are just thoughts, and the schema.org & activitystrea.ms should
continue discussing how to make things fit together nicely.

-Yaar