[Oslc-Automation] schema.org Actions & OSLC Actions

[Martin P Pain]

My attention has been drawn to the fact that schema.org has defined RDF 
types (and presumably predicates, but I can't work out the URIs for them) 
for use in JSON-LD to describe actions in a similar way to what OSLC 
Actions is attempting to do: http://schema.org/docs/actions.html (and in 
case you don't have the OSLC link: 
http://open-services.net/wiki/core/Actions-2.0/)

Google supports schema.org actions for embedding actions in e-mails: 
https://developers.google.com/gmail/actions/reference/one-click-action

A few observations:
If they have types & predicates that we are duplicating, we ought to 
consider whether we ought to or not.
It appears to be aimed solely at JSON-LD, not [other forms of] RDF.
The input/output parameters look distinctly non-RDF.
It is designed for flexibility of the people/systems creating the data (to 
make it easy to construct the data to embed it in e-mails, webpages, etc) 
not the systems that parse it - which is the opposite of the focus of 
OSLC, as OSLC data is not designed to be embedded in other documents but 
be used as a REST API format. (That's not to say that we couldn't define a 
profile of it).
The schema.org and Google pages seem to use a different property as the 
equivalent of our "oslc:binding" property - the schema.org docs use 
"target", which is either a URI or an object of type "EntryPoint", but the 
Google link above uses "handler" with an object of type 
"HttpActionHandler".
If we wanted to re-use this instead of the Action type we have already 
defined, I expect we would want to define a subtype of EntryPoint or a 
type of handler that corresponds to Automation Plans and delegate UIs.

I don't have the energy or the motivation to change things now. I think 
our target use cases are different enough to warrant different approaches. 
(I just wish I'd done better research and come across this myself 
sooner...) So I don't propose we change anything, I just wanted to make 
other people aware of this in case they wanted to propose anything in 
light of the similarities.

Martin

P.S. The latest changes to schema.org actions appears to have been pushed 
by Google and applied in April this year: 
http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/ActivityActions  and  
http://blog.schema.org/2014/04/announcing-schemaorg-actions.html
P.P.S. I think we also have some overlap with Hydra: 
http://www.w3.org/community/hydra/
Unless stated otherwise above:
IBM United Kingdom Limited - Registered in England and Wales with number 
741598. 
Registered office: PO Box 41, North Harbour, Portsmouth, Hampshire PO6 3AU
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://open-services.net/pipermail/oslc-automation_open-services.net/attachments/20140924/d01166bc/attachment-0003.html>