Business domains, LD vocabulary extensions and namespaces

[aschrijver]

This topic is in reaction to the following (and would be OT there):

@pukkamustard

@grishka

If I’m adding fields to an ActivityPub object, and I expect them to be used widely in the future, which namespace should I be using? My own, i.e. http://smithereen.software/ns# ? ActivityStreams? Something else?

Excellent question.

FEPs do not have any control of what should be added to ActivityStreams. Maybe it might make sense to add a FEP namespace (e.g. https://activitypub.dev/fep/ns# ) where things can be added but in the mean time I think it is better to use your own.

I am sorry in advance if this shows technical ignorance (to my regret and own fault I don’t manage to get rid of non-technical stuff in favor of ‘deep work’ and coding).

In Fediverse Futures: Visions & dreams. Feedback wanted I make a case in elaborating business cases for specific application domains, aligning with the idea of defining specific and standardized Linked Data vocabularies for that (think ForgeFed) and implementations able to handle them (think go-fed, openEngiadina, BonFire, etc.)

(PS I also suggested Domain Driven Design as an excellent way to elaborate these vocabularies)

In terms of the namespace to use for them, a https://activitypub.dev/fep/ns# wouldn’t cut it then. The namespace should specifically address the application / business domain that the vocabulary extension targets, e.g.

https://activitypub.dev/fep/e7b9/campaigns/ns#

or (different scheme):

https://activitypub.dev/fep/communities/1.0/ns#

Or something else entirely, as @pukkamustard suggests we elaborate.

[how]

@pukkamustard

add a FEP namespace (e.g. https://activitypub.dev/fep/ns# )

We already depend on a number of domains:

• activitypub.rocks (the official one for the spec)
• activitypub.eu (used for emails on this forum)
• activitypub.dev (used for FEPs)

Maybe we should think of consolidating this into a single one, and make the management of this domain more collective. The reason for the .eu was to enable integrated email management with infinite on-demand aliases, and the lack of access to such feature on the .rocks domain. Not sure about .dev.

Since the choice of a domain for FEP examples requires permanence, we’d rather make a collectively sound choice.

[cjs]

@how

Not sure about .dev .

.dev is something I bought a long time ago, and decided to just start using to get things up somewhere (the testsuite, the library of blog posts, and then at apconf 2020 it was arbitrarily picked for FEP). Happy to move things off of it under a different domain and set up a URL redirect.

If it was easier to spin things up or get things approved (by socialcg?) to be hosted under a different domain I wouldn’t use the .dev one, it really is just for my convenience atm.