Skip to toolbar

Community & Business Groups

Experience API (xAPI) Vocabulary & Semantic Interoperability Community Group

Group closed 2023-12-11

Currently Experience API (xAPI) mostly focuses on providing “structural” interoperability via JavaScript Object Notation Language (JSON). Structural interoperability defines the syntax of the data exchange and ensures the data exchanged between systems can be interpreted at the data field level. In comparison, semantic interoperability leverages the structural interoperability of the data exchange, but provides a vocabulary so other systems and consumers can also interpret the data. Analytics produced by xAPI statements would benefit from more consistent and semantic approaches to describing domain-specific verbs. The xAPI specification recommends implementers to adopt community-defined vocabularies, but the only current guidance is to provide very basic, human-readable identifier metadata (e.g., literal string name(display), description). The main objective of the Vocabulary and Semantic Interoperability Working Group (WG) is to research machine-readable, semantic technologies (e.g., RDF, JSON-LD) in order to produce guidance for Communities of Practice (CoPs) on creating, publishing, or managing controlled vocabulary datasets (e.g., verbs).

adlnet/xapi-profiles

Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time

Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.

No Reports Yet Published

Learn more about publishing.

Chairs, when logged in, may publish draft and final reports. Please see report requirements.

This group does not have a Chair and thus cannot publish new reports. Learn how to choose a Chair.

Companion Specification & Primer for xAPI Vocabularies

A  Companion Specification and Vocabulary Primer is now available for public comment. This announcement comes nearly one year since the Vocabulary Considerations for XAPI white paper was published by ADL. Following the white paper, ADL facilitated by this W3C community-driven xAPI Vocabulary Working Group to investigate how to improve semantic interoperability for xAPI. These documents are applicable to anyone creating new vocabulary terms (Verbs or Activity Types) for xAPI. It is also applicable to any individuals or organizations developing applications for publishing, storing or retrieving vocabulary identifiers and definitions, or any other types of services that need to query the semantic meaning of xAPI vocabulary data. We are looking for community feedback on these documents before applying vocabulary-specific revisions to the core xAPI Specification.

 

Call for Participation in Experience API (xAPI) Vocabulary & Semantic Interoperability Community Group

The Experience API (xAPI) Vocabulary & Semantic Interoperability Community Group has been launched:


Currently Experience API (xAPI) mostly focuses on providing “structural” interoperability via JavaScript Object Notation Language (JSON). Structural interoperability defines the syntax of the data exchange and ensures the data exchanged between systems can be interpreted at the data field level. In comparison, semantic interoperability leverages the structural interoperability of the data exchange, but provides a vocabulary so other systems and consumers can also interpret the data. Analytics produced by xAPI statements would benefit from more consistent and semantic approaches to describing domain-specific verbs. The xAPI specification recommends implementers to adopt community-defined vocabularies, but the only current guidance is to provide very basic, human-readable identifier metadata (e.g., literal string name(display), description). The main objective of the Vocabulary and Semantic Interoperability Working Group (WG) is to research machine-readable, semantic technologies (e.g., RDF, JSON-LD) in order to produce guidance for Communities of Practice (CoPs) on creating, publishing, or managing controlled vocabulary datasets (e.g., verbs).


In order to join the group, you will need a W3C account. Please note, however, that W3C Membership is not required to join a Community Group.

This is a community initiative. This group was originally proposed on 2015-07-15 by Jason Haag. The following people supported its creation: Jason Haag, Avron Barr, Jason Lewis, Russell Duhon, Ingo Dahn. W3C’s hosting of this group does not imply endorsement of the activities.

The group must now choose a chair. Read more about how to get started in a new group and good practice for running a group.

We invite you to share news of this new group in social media and other channels.

If you believe that there is an issue with this group that requires the attention of the W3C staff, please email us at site-comments@w3.org

Thank you,
W3C Community Development Team