Position Paper - Gregg Kellogg

Recent activity in adding actions to schema.org and the Hydra CG allow for new mechanisms to automatically provision applications to interact with web services. Coupled with semantic markup of web-pages using RDFa or microdata, actions can provide a mechanism annotating web pages specifically provisioned for this, in cooperation with the publishing service. JSON-LD enables a common language to be used among services, so that clients can have a single format for communicating actions to a service, even if the details vary between different service providers.

Annotating web pages not specifically provisioned for actions may be accomplished in a similar way by using semantic markup inherent in HTML5 documents. Using an operation overlay, annotation operations (and really any other type of action) cold be supported by a third-party annotation service, which implicitly adds markup to a page (using JQuery, for example) which describes alternative service endpoints for sending such operations. When a common overlay service is used by many users, the annotations and other operations performed within a community may become generally available.