This page tracks a proposal to revise schema.org's approach to past, present and future Actions in Schema.org.

This work stems from a collaboration amongst the schema.org partners, and supercedes the earlier drafts linked below. Comments and discussion is welcomed via the W3C public-vocabs@w3.org email list.

This document proposes the introduction of actions to the schema.org vocabulary, in the form of a new Class of Things, called Actions.

Actions are used to describe an affordance to perform a certain operation (proposed) or an operation that already happened (completed). Each action has corresponding arguments/slots/parameters that are well defined.

Actions define a standard programmatic pre-defined interface between parties (e.g. which arguments "Watching a Movie" takes), and Entrypoint helps with the mechanisms (e.g. invoking an action via an android intent vs a HTTP GET).

Actions allows the machine-readable brokering language between providers, registries and consumers.

We use case grammar and framenet to define the semantic roles that are relevant to each verb (e.g. LendAction has a borrower slot).

Status

  • Implemented as schema.org v1.2.
  • Final call for review.
  • TODO(goto): Explore/Design SupportedClass, SupportedProperty
  • TODO(goto): Explore/Design the protocol specification of HttpHandler
  • TODO(goto): Explore/Design constraints (actions -> entities mappings)
  • TODO(goto): Publish Thing.operation (entity -> actions mappings)
  • TODO(goto): Publish ActionHandler
  • TODO(goto): Publish ActionStatus
  • TODO(goto): Publish bug fixes/typos
  • Publish synsets hierarchy to disambiguate
  • Publish base Action class and base parameters
  • Next step (alongside public-vocabs discussion) is to generate a machine-readable schema definition. Dan Brickley will do this.
  • Some RDFa examples should be added.

Vocabulary

See PDF for details.

Drafts

Related Work