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

[Steve K Speicher]

Martin,

Thanks for taking a look at this.  To be clear, I only brought this up as 
something mostly to be aware of (not specific or immediate action to take, 
pardon the pun).  I didn't think we needed to change course.  Other than 
the obvious name match, there are some integration approaches that 
schema.org is using to put "actionable" data that various website publish 
and sites like google can include in their results.   This pattern and 
approach is interesting approach, mostly when dealing with data in an 
index from different sources.  Which is a scenario we have in OSLC, though 
not what the automation spec covers explicitly but the usage has been 
discussed before.  Google estimates that 21% of all websites contain some 
schema.org data.

I'd have to disagree with one point you made about what OSLC approaches 
are, specifically on usage of the data (REST api only, versus others). 
OSLC is about integrations.  Some solutions and scenarios are a fit for a 
set of technologies.  Though OSLC should instead adopt the best technology 
to solve the scenario, leveraging what we've had or adopting new 
approaches.  We do have the scenario where data is being exposed as Linked 
Data resources intended to be put into a common index and queries run 
against.  So we have a primary scenario of need to make it easy to publish 
data in this case.  Ideally, these implementations would expose it has 
writable Linked Data but the scenario doesn't require it.  These indexes 
typically expose rich hovers and actions would be a nice add.

Thanks,
Steve Speicher
IBM Rational Software
OSLC - Lifecycle integration inspired by the web -> 
http://open-services.net



From:   Martin P Pain <martinpain at uk.ibm.com>
To:     oslc-automation at open-services.net
Date:   09/24/2014 08:21 AM
Subject:        [Oslc-Automation] schema.org Actions & OSLC Actions
Sent by:        "Oslc-Automation" 
<oslc-automation-bounces at open-services.net>



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/
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