Multiple object types as an extensibility mechanism has been removed
from the data model since it didn't seem to actually work that well in
practice and made it hard to write a generic parser.
I would suggest you just invent the "question" and "answer" types and
use the In Reply To Object component that is available for all object
types to represent the relationship between the answer and its question.
Parsers that don't understand your object types can then fall back on
generic processing of the core properties, which I think includes all of
the main properties of a question and an answer.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Activity Streams" group.
To post to this group, send email to activity...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to activity-strea...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/activity-streams?hl=en.
I feel like we're heading towards a world where object types are ignored
by most applications and all objects are just handled generically by the
common components.
We have a rich enough data model in the basic object construct for most
objects now. The things that do differ for a practical reason, such as
events, can be handled by progressive enhancement just looking for the
relevant extra properties in applications that care about such things.
The only apps that need to really care about the explicit types are
those that are doing further processing on the received activities
rather than just displaying them, such as filtering or extracting
certain kinds of data to inform some other process.
So with that said, I think it's better to just omit the explicit object
type rather than overloading an existing defined type, but defining a
new type benefits the rare applications that *do* want to discriminate
for some reason.
Yes, that was silly :D. I guess you can't reply (in Google Groups) to
messages that were posted before you joined the group / mailing list
(and I didn't notice).
I've reposted to the list.
> To answer your question though, does this really need to be reflected in the feed? How many other aggregators are going to care about the state of a question? (do any other QnA feeds highlight this?)
Well, some aggregators may. Here's something I can imagine (totally
making this up): suppose an application like ThinkUp
(http://thinkupapp.com/) consumed an activity stream from a QnA site
(it doesn't do anything of the sort, yet, but bear with me). It might
like to compile statistics on which questions were answered, how many
answers were posted before the asker marked a question as answered,
how many questions were closed by the original asker, how many
questions never received a best answer, etc. I'm not sure ThinkUp
would fall into the category of aggregator per se, maybe more like
curation and analytics, but its closely related.
And is simple aggregation considered the only use case for activity
streams? I think the ability to curate social activities is important
as well. StatusNet, and some other systems, are using Activity Streams
as part of the communication protocol, OStatus.
Perhaps these kinds of use cases fall outside of the scope of the
Activity Streams project, but nevertheless there is a real need for a
portable way to express social activities, and Activity Streams is the
best thing going right now.
> Adding this extra complexity might seem like a good idea to the content producer, but you just added a new set of processing and complexity to anyone who wants to aggregate your feed. If that complexity isn't explicitly required, then most will likely just drop your feed altogether.
Or they can ignore things they don't want / understand and continue processing.
Zach
ar 19, 2011, at 8:17 AM, zcopley wrote:
>
>> On Jan 7, 7:26 pm, Danayel <dan...@ninjaforge.com> wrote:
>>>> Are these significant enough to require separate object types? I'm not
>>>> sure. The existence of Aardvark, Quora, FB Answers, and Stack Exchange
>>>> suggests that these differences are valuable to people.
>>>
>>> But are these differences something that needs to be reflected in the
>>> syndicated data or something that can be handled by an aggregator?
>>>
>>> I think the line between QnA and Article and Comment (hereafter AnC)
>>> aren't clear cut until you put them into a system that treats them as
>>> one or the other.
>>
>> Now that I'm implementing a QnA system, I'm finding AnC lacking. I
>> want to be able to indicate that a question is closed (no longer
>> requires answering) but still allow comments on it. I want to be able
>> to mark an answer as the best answer, yet still allow comments on the
>> answer too.
>>
>> Or maybe I'm just not seeing a good way to model this with the
>> existing object types. Any suggestions?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Zach
>
>