Activity Streams/Primer/Vocabulary conflicts

Users of AS2 may incorporate other vocabularies that have terms that conflict with the AS2 terms.

When this happens, there are a few possibilities for disambiguating the terms.

Use namespaces

One way to disambiguate is to provide namespace prefixes for the two vocabularies, and use those prefixes within the document. For example:

{
   "@context": {
       "as": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
       "ex": "https://example.com/ns/vocabulary#"
   },
   "as:type": "Object",
   "ex:type": "Integer",
}

Define your property within the document's @context

If there is not an URI for the external vocabulary, you can define the property within the AS2 document's @context, and use a prefix for the AS2 property:

{
   "@context": {
       "as": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
       "type": {
          "@type": "@value"
       }
   },
   "as:type": "Object",
   "type": "Integer",
}

Use an alias

If using namespace prefixes is inconvenient, it is possible to define an alias within the document. For example:

{
   "@context": {
       "as": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
       "ex": "https://example.com/ns/vocabulary#",
       "myType": "ex:type",
   },
   "type": "Object",
   "myType": "Integer",
}

Alternately, we can define an alias for the AS2 term instead:

{
   "@context": {
       "https://example.com/ns/vocabulary#",
       "as": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
       "asType": "as:type",
   },
   "asType": "Object",
   "type": "Integer",
}

External links

Issue 435