Proposal: remove lesser used properties from Activity Vocabulary, refactor others

[jasnell]

There were some additional properties added speculatively to the AS2 vocabulary earlier on it's it's dev cycle that are proving less than generally useful. There's also a couple carry overs from AS1 that ought to be deprecated.

1. The valid* properties. These were intended to offer a date-based validity bound for an Object's metadata. While useful, these can easily be provided as an extension where necessary. They are not generally useful for all objects and have a questionable processing model since we do not define exactly what "validity" means. These just just be removed.
2. The status property on Activity. This was one was added earlier in the AS2 dev cycle (pre-WG) and was always very speculative and has proven less than useful. This one should just be removed.
3. The existing "author" property on objects. This is a carryover from AS1. Not all objects have authors and there's a confusing overlap between "actor" and "author". This one should be deprecated but still allowed.

[tantek]

1. Drop everything not implemented. If it's not implemented, it's not useful (given ActivityStreams has now been around for years).
2. If people complain, make them document their implementation on the wiki.
3. Using "actor" instead of "author" seems dumb and unnecessary bikeshedding breaking/forking from Atom, hAtom, h-entry etc. etc. If you're going to drop one, drop "actor", and go back to "author" which is already in wide use in stream/feed semantics/formats.

[elf-pavlik]

The existing "author" property on objects. This is a carryover from AS1. Not all objects have authors and there's a confusing overlap between "actor" and "author". This one should be deprecated but still allowed.

How would then relation between Activity and it's result look? Currently one could write

{
  "@context": [
    "http://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
    { "@vocab": "http://schema.org" }
  ],
  "@type": ["ReviewAction", "Activity"],
  "actor": "https://wwelves.org/perpetual-tripper",
  "object": "http://www.bigbuckbunny.org",
  "result": {
    "@type": "Review",
    "author": "https://wwelves.org/perpetual-tripper",
    "itemReviewd": "http://www.bigbuckbunny.org",
    "reviewBody": "very funny!"
}

it does have some ugly and possibly confusing duplication, one of alternatives which i would see:

{
  "@context": [
    "http://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
    { "@vocab": "http://schema.org" }
  ],
  "@type": ["Review", "Activity"],
  "author": "https://wwelves.org/perpetual-tripper",
  "object": "http://www.bigbuckbunny.org",
  "reviewBody": "very funny!"
}

big issue i see with it - it would make harder to use all kind of existing types of possible results, which duplication from first example enables in quite straight forward way

[jasnell]

Disagree with removing "actor". While "author" may be common in HTML, "actor" is ubiquitous in existing Activity Streams implementations and "author" is meaningful only on a limited set of objects. Per your own reasoning (looking at existing implementations) we have plenty of justification for keeping "actor"

[elf-pavlik]

@tantek author != agent/actor for example:

@elf-pavlik posts activity: "@tantek ate an apple"
author - @elf-pavlik
agent/actor - @tantek

I have impression that you might approach it from a blogger perspective, while people also want to post about all kind of other social interactions online...

[tantek]

Elf - it's a hypothetical example and thus ignorable compared to the plethora real world examples we have to work with. When you're making such posts with permalinks on your website, add them here and we can resume discussion.

[gobengo]

Relevant: This real-world use case.
https://github.com/gobengo/activity-mocks/blob/master/mocks/livefyre/add-topic-to-collection.json

In this activity, the actor, object, tag, and overall activity all have semantically different 'authors'

• actor - a Livefyre Site - authored by whatever subject initiated the creation of that Site
• object - a Livefyre Topic - authored by whichever subject initiated the creation of that Topic
• target - a Livefyre Collection - authored by whichever subject initiated the creation of that Livefyre Collection

In all cases, the subject that creates a Site, Topic, or Collection can be a UserProfile, Site, Network, or 'Client' (oAuth2 Client).

The author of this activity itself is Livefyre's ActivityStream subsystem.

[tantek]

Not real-world - per _mock_.

Again, "When you're making such posts with permalinks on your website, add them here and we can resume discussion."

[gobengo]

@tantek http://bengo.is/notes/20150411-reply.html

[jasnell]

#1 and #2 contradict each other. "actor" is implemented in AS systems.
"author" less so.

On Fri, Nov 14, 2014 at 11:49 AM, Tantek Çelik notifications@github.com
wrote:

1. Drop everything not implemented. If it's not implemented, it's not
   useful (given ActivityStreams has now been around for years).
2. If people complain, make them document their implementation on the
   wiki.
3. Using "actor" instead of "author" seems dumb and unnecessary
   bikeshedding breaking/forking from Atom, hAtom, h-entry etc. etc. If you're
   going to drop one, drop "actor", and go back to "author" which is already
   in wide use in stream/feed semantics/formats.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#54 (comment)
.

[elf-pavlik]

Interesting example trying to talk about 'spoofing' from ActivityPump draft

{"verb":   "like",
         "actor":  "https://example.net/~mallory",
         "object": {
            "@id":      "https://example.org/~alice/note/23",
            "author":   "https://example.org/~alice",
            "content":  "I'm a goat"
          }
 }

http://w3c-social.github.io/activitypump/#obj

I still find it useful to have way to express sad but nowadays still true activities like: "Officer Harry Attacked protester Jane" which clearly does require different agent and author...

[csarven]

re: #54 (comment)

+1

[elf-pavlik]

Elf - it's a hypothetical example and thus ignorable compared to the plethora real world examples we have to work with. When you're making such posts with permalinks on your website, add them here and we can resume discussion.

@tantek I just mentioned on IRC that all our teleconference/f2f minutes have different agent/actor (person who says something) and different author (person who writes (scribes) trying to reflect meaning of spoken word). If we record telecons, we can see differences between spoken and written worlds.