Specifications, contexts, and other documents (and the AS2 Ontology)

ActivityPub
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@eprodrom has split the AS2 ontology document into its own repository so the community can maintain it. :pray:

The repository is at: An unofficial ontology For the Activity Streams 2.0 vocabulary (github.com)

I’ve been reviewing the ontology and thinking of how to address some of the issues with it. It’s interesting because the information in the ontology, the normative AS2 JSON-LD context, the AP and AS2 Recommendation documents and some other unofficial documents like the HTML document corresponding to the JSON-LD context ( ActivityStreams 2.0 Terms (w3.org)) are not consistent.

For example, there are normative context terms like IsFollowing and IsFollowedBy that are not included in any of the normative AP/AS2 documents (AFAICT). They are only described in a W3C-internal, unofficial document (the AS2 Terms doc). And there are terms linked in the HTML terms document that are not in the JSON-LD context, like attachments (vs attachment) and author. That’s not as surprising since the HTML terms document is not normative. Still, it doesn’t seem great that the HTML representation of the normative JSON-LD context is not consistent with that context.

We’ll need to decide if the ontology should match the normative W3C Recommendation documents or the normative JSON-LD context (or some combination of the two).

If there is a WG recharter, I think that making the normative recommendations and the JSON-LD context consistent would be a good task.

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My guess is that these are probably legacy / deprecated terms that were removed from the spec before it reached Rec status, but were left in the context either intentionally for backwards compatibility or due to an oversight

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The OWL file has been moved back to the original location after a kerfuffle at the W3C. More details can be found on the SWICG (or is it now SWCG?) mailing list.

The other questions I raised previously about the inconsistencies between the normative Recommendations and the normative json-ld context remain open. These are orthogonal to the unofficial OWL file location controversy.

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Thanks for keeping abreast of the OWL hooha.

So, to clarify, this is being treated as the focus?:
https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams-owl

And this one is no longer being improved upon?:

(I havent done a diff but Im assuming that they are the same).

The naming conventions are different (AS vs AV2), is this distinction supposed to be more pertinent over time?

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My understanding is that the following is the official unofficial ontology (at least for the version-controlled source of the information related to the link you mentioned):

activitystreams/vocabulary/activitystreams2.owl at master · w3c/activitystreams (github.com)

Prior to recent events, it had not been touched since 2016.

The SWICG copy and associated repo is deprecated (for the moment, at least).

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No decision has been made yet, the choice to move it to a separate repo has been put on hold to allow for more community discussion. It’s not correct to say either that the file will or will not move to another repo since the discussion has not yet concluded.

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Who is this? ahouseholder (Allen D. Householder) · GitHub
is he involved in this thread?

And @nightpool if

the discussion has not yet concluded

then there is still an active discussion ?

I am happy about this thread!

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8

Hey, @stevebate . Could you report these to the issue tracker on GitHub, please?

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9

I’ve submitted several PRs and a related issue.

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