Re: An updated draft of the schema.org/Action proposal

On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 2:19 AM, Markus Lanthaler
<markus.lanthaler@gmx.net>wrote:

> On Wednesday, November 13, 2013 11:36 PM, Sam Goto wrote:
> > On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 12:06 PM, Markus Lanthaler wrote:
> > > I'm still worried about the
> > > whole ActionHandler stuff as I've already explained in the past. This
> > > RPC-based model is quite anti-Web and thus I would like to see this
> stuff
> > > more aligned with how the Web works, i.e., the manipulation of
> resources
> by
> > > the exchange of state representations.
> > >
> > > I find this draft is a steps backwards in that regard as it couples the
> data
> > > expected by an action to the action itself:
> > >
> > >  "Each action has corresponding arguments/slots/parameters that
> > >   are well defined. Actions define a standard programmatic
> > >   predefined interface between parties (e.g. which arguments
> > >   "Watching a Movie" takes), and ActionHandlers helps with the
> > >   Mechanisms (e.g. invoking an action via an android intent vs
> > >   a HTTP GET)."
> >
> > Just to be very clear, this specific regard (the fact that the schema
> defines
> > the arguments/parameters) is consistent with every single draft we put
> out
> > in the past (you can find all the earlier drafts here). There are no
> changes
> > in this draft on this subject.
>
> You are right(ish). What I meant is that in previous proposals the action
> handler had requiredProperties/optionalProperties (just as GMail Actions
> have) where as the latest draft doesn't have that anymore. Instead it seems
> to suggest that the Action itself specifies which data is to be send to the
> server. In the previous drafts the properties on the action looked like
> they
> were describing the action in more details and not defining the interface
> to
> the server.
>

Yep, that's my fault, I dropped that unintentionally. We originally had
"ActionHandler.optionalProperty/requiredProperty" and
"ActionHandler.hasPayload" but I agree that "expects" and "returns" makes a
lot more sense: they are more powerful and cleaner.

Here, I updated the spec to include those:

http://www.w3.org/wiki/images/b/b9/Actionsinschema.org.pdf


>
>
> > > Do you really expect to, e.g., have different actions to rent a
> > > skiing shoes from renting a house?
> >
> > I expect there will be high coverage of common nouns and verbs in
> > http://schema.org long term. We have a http://schema.org/RentAction,
> > which can be used in combination with nouns like
> http://schema.org/SkiingShoes
> > or http://schema.org/House as these become problems that really need
> > to be modeled.
>
> Yet, RentAction "defines" only the two properties landlord and
> realEstateAgent itself. This is hardly useful when renting skiing shoes and
> will probably confuse developers.
>
>
> > For the long tail of problems, the extension mechanism can help us
> > understand verbs/nouns that are not yet in http://schema.org.
>
> Agreed, even though we need to move away from the current extension
> mechanism advocating non-resolvable IRIs
> (http://schema.org/docs/extension.html) and instead move towards a more
> linked data driven approach with resolvable IRIs.
>
>
> > > Currently RentAction's "parameters" according to your
> > > draft [2] are "landlord" and "realEstateAgent". What's the rationale
> behind
> > > this decision? I think the sole purpose of the action itself should be
> to
> > > convey the semantics of what happens or, in other words, what the
> > > consequences I can expect when I invoke an action.
> >
> > I think that should be one of the goals, yes. In addition to that goal, I
> > believe it is important for actions to define which arguments/parameters
> > they take.
>
> That may turn out to be very difficult IMO.
>

Agreed. But it is a *lot* more useful.


>
>
> Cheers,
> Markus
>
>
> --
> Markus Lanthaler
> @markuslanthaler
>
>
>