WebSchemas/ActivityActions

This is an archived WebSchemas proposal Activities and Actions (update) for schema.org. See Proposals listing for more. Note: active schema.org development is now based at github

This page tracks a proposal to revise schema.org's approach to past, present and future Actions in Schema.org.

This work stems from a collaboration amongst the schema.org partners, and supercedes the earlier drafts linked below. Comments and discussion is welcomed via the W3C public-vocabs@w3.org email list.

Overview (extracted from the pdf)

This document proposes the introduction of actions to the schema.org vocabulary, in the form of a new Class of Things, called Actions.

Actions are used to describe an affordance to perform a certain operation (proposed) or an operation that already happened (completed). Each action has corresponding arguments/slots/parameters that are well defined.

Actions define a standard programmatic pre-defined interface between parties (e.g. which arguments "Watching a Movie" takes), and Entrypoint helps with the mechanisms (e.g. invoking an action via an android intent vs a HTTP GET).

Actions allows the machine-readable brokering language between providers, registries and consumers.

We use case grammar and framenet to define the semantic roles that are relevant to each verb (e.g. LendAction has a borrower slot).

Status

• Implemented as schema.org v1.2.
• Final call for review.
• TODO(goto): Explore/Design SupportedClass, SupportedProperty
• TODO(goto): Explore/Design the protocol specification of HttpHandler
• TODO(goto): Explore/Design constraints (actions -> entities mappings)
• TODO(goto): Publish Thing.operation (entity -> actions mappings)
• TODO(goto): Publish ActionHandler
• TODO(goto): Publish ActionStatus
• TODO(goto): Publish bug fixes/typos
• Publish synsets hierarchy to disambiguate
• Publish base Action class and base parameters
• Next step (alongside public-vocabs discussion) is to generate a machine-readable schema definition. Dan Brickley will do this.
• Some RDFa examples should be added.

Vocabulary

See PDF for details.

Drafts

• April 11 revision - addresses final review comments received on the final review document, implemented as schema.org v1.2.
  • Note that in addition to the changes listed, PropertyConstraint was also renamed to PropertyValueSpecification, for clarity.
• Potential Actions - final call for review (announcements
• Schema.org/Action draft 6 work in progress
• Schema.org/Action Draft 5
• Schema.org/Action Draft 4
• File:Actions in Schema.org - Draft 3.pdf (pdf)
• File:ActionsinSchema.org2013-05-11.pdf (pdf)
• A revised proposal based on schema.org team discussions, November 2012; see Schema.org Actions (minimal draft) PDF
  • An RDFS/RDFa schema specifying this (with minor changes) is available in the webschemas mercurial repo
• A proposal was made in April 2012, see announcement or full proposal.

Related Work

• Android Intents
• Web Intents
• Hydra (W3C Community Group)
• Activitystrea.ms verb registry
• Complimentary proposals Reservations and Orders.