Some comments on Actions

Hi,

Some comments/thoughts on the Actions draft.

Reading the draft I wondered whether there ought to be clearer
separation between:

* the Action
* the object to which the action applies
* the result of performing that action

That might be the actual goal, but I found some of the examples
confusing. For example BuyAction seems to be a type of action, but the
document also shows things that are of type BuyAction but which are
actually the *result*.

This is also in evidence in examples like:

Thing > Action > BuyAction > BuyTicketAction > BuyMovieTicketAction.

If there's a clean separation between the different objects then you
wouldn't need to have extensions for Tickets or Movies: these are the
objects that are being bought. An individual service (or app) will
relate the generic BuyAction to one or more types of object, e.g. a
"buy ticket action" in an instance of a BuyAction that has been
described as applying to Ticket objects.

For Action results it might be useful to look at the Event Ontology
[1]. That has a good general model for describing an event, its
participants, the things involved (the Application or Service here),
and the outputs, e.g. a Reservation.

Schema.org could use a similar base model which could then be
extended. Again the types would be fairly generic. E.g. an
Order/Purchase could apply to a Ticket, Reservation, Product, etc. It
would be a common basis for extension by others.

Cheers,

L.

[1]. http://motools.sourceforge.net/event/event.html


--
Leigh Dodds
Freelance Technologist
Open Data, Linked Data Geek
t: @ldodds
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Received on Friday, 17 May 2013 16:52:00 UTC