Clarifications on why verbs are not tense specific

[Sandeep Shetty]

I've searched the list and came across these two references:
* https://groups.google.com/group/activity-streams/msg/75ed3af079f5b31d
* https://groups.google.com/group/activity-streams/msg/f413fa773b5e97b9

* I understand the design consideration behind letting the client
choose how it wants to render verbs in the UI but isn't information
lost by doing this? For example, how do I communicate that "James is
reading some-book"? The triple (james, read, some-book) seems
inadequate for this even if we include time as mentioned in the
referenced post.
* Does a client really need to decide on the "appropriate language,
tense, gender, etc".? Wouldn't just the past and present tense be
enough? (which is, sort of what Facebook does as well, except for the
imperative tense:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/define-actions/)
* the referenced post above mentions "ActivityPub API" which I
couldn't find info about to understand why "past tense is inaccurate"
for it.

--
Sandeep Shetty

[Sandeep Shetty]

Is anybody out there?

--
Sandeep Shetty

[James M Snell]

Activity Statements are generally not time bound. 

that is, for example, the statement:

  {

    "actor": {"displayName": "James"},

    "verb": "read",

    "object": {"displayName": "A book")

  }

Holds true whether I am currently reading a book or read it a year ago. The "published" and "updated" properties indicate when the statement was made but does not indicate when the actual activity occurred (or whether it is currently occurring).

To provide time bounding, two additional properties could be used for an activity statement (see the schema doc for details).. basically, if we add a "startTime" and "endTime" to the activity statement, we can provide some indication of the window of time within which an activity began and ended...

  {

    "actor": {"displayName": "James"},

    "verb": "read",

    "object": {"displayName": "A book"),

    "startTime": "2012-10-16T12:00:00Z"

  }

Looking at this, and seeing that there is no endTime, and seeing that startTime is in the past, I can likely assume that the activity is ongoing currently. If the endTime was specified then we can assume the activity occurred in the past. If the startTime specifies a future date, then we can assume the activity is pending.

It's going to be entirely up to the application to figure out the appropriate representation in human-readable text, however. 

- James

--
Sandeep Shetty

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[Sandeep Shetty]

Makes sense. Thanks James for the detailed response.

--
Sandeep Shetty