Re: Activity Proposal Review

Hi James,

I'm looking forward to reading your 2.0 draft you proposed.

There are a few things that are implicit in the Schema.org Actions
proposal. Please be mindful of these:
1. Schema.org is an encoding-agnostic vocabulary. In addition to JSON-LD,
it can be encoded via Microdata, RDFa, among other formats.
2. Nouns and verbs are intended to share as much machinery as possible:
Same documentation formats, same machine-readable specs, same encodings,
same type system, etc. Its an intended feature, that will allow the
schema.org community to easily adopt actions using the existing set of
tools and technologies.


Other than that, you mapped the differences between schema.org actions and
activitystrea.ms pretty well. Some comments:

> 1. Instead of "verb", it uses "@type"
The intension here was to use the existing schema.org type system, rather
than introduce another one, and so that it can do 3. & 4. below

>> 2. Instead of "actor", it uses "performedBy"
This decision is not core to the proposal and can be changed.

>> 3. Instead of "object", it uses domain specific "extension" properties
associated with the verb/@type:
These are crucial for the different use cases: Declaring the purposes of
forms and webpages, defining "method" prototypes on objects, precise
activity logs and delegation of action execution. All of these need
strongly-typed verb-specific extensions rather than generic objects and
targets.

> 4. It omits the general "target" concept entirely
Not omits - but uses domain specific properties instead of a general
"target". For the same reasoning as 3.

> 5. It adds additional common properties that are not currently part of the
core Activity Streams model or that are defined as extensions (e.g. within
the schema spec)
Correct. The core one is "actionStatus", used to denote the "tense" of the
verb: "Past" (http://schema.org/ActionStatus/Completed), "Present"
(Pending), "Conditional Future" (Tentative) as well as cancelled
(Cancelled). The rest are similar to ActivityStrea.ms, and if not, they are
there mostly to comply with schema.org Thing: (name, url, thumbnail, etc).

Best,
Yaar