This specification details a model for representing potential and completed activities using the JSON format. It is intended to be used with vocabularies that detail the structure of activities, and define specific types of activities.
In the most basic sense, an "Activity" is a semantic description of an action. It is the goal of this specification to provide a JSON-based syntax that is sufficient to express metadata about activities in a rich, human-friendly but machine-processable and extensible manner. This can include constructing natural-language descriptions or visual representations about the activity, associating actionable information with various types of objects, communicating or recording activity logs, or delegation of potential actions to other applications.
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [[!RFC2119]].
Activity Streams 2.0 is suitable as a social data syntax. It forms part of the [[SWP]] suite of related standards.
The JSON Activity Streams 1.0 [[AS1]] specification was published in May of 2011 and provided a baseline extensible syntax for the expression of completed activities. This specification builds upon that initial foundation by incorporating lessons learned through extensive implementation, community feedback and related ongoing work from a variety of other communities.
Some of the issues that specifically motivated the evolution of Activity Streams 2.0 from Activity Streams 1.0 include:
The terms displayName
, verb
,
title
and objectType
should be treated as
reserved terms that SHOULD NOT be used within Activity Streams 2.0
documents. When encountered in an Activity Streams 2.0 document, they
SHOULD be processed in accordance to the guidelines listed in
This specification describes a JSON-based [[!RFC7159]] serialization syntax for the Activity Vocabulary that conforms to a subset of [[!JSON-LD]] syntax constraints but does not require JSON-LD processing. While other serialization forms are possible, such alternatives are not discussed by this document.
When serialized, absent properties are represented by either (a) setting the property value to null, or (b) by omitting the property declaration altogether at the option of the publisher. These representations are semantically equivalent. If a property has an array value, the absence of any items in that array MUST be represented by omitting the property entirely or by setting the value to null. The appropriate interpretation of an omitted or explicitly null value is that no value has been assigned as opposed to the view that the given value is empty or nil.
An Activity Streams
Document is a JSON document whose root value is an
Activity Streams Object of any type, including a
Collection, and whose MIME media type is
"application/activity+json
".
Activity Streams 2.0 documents MUST be serialized using the UTF-8 character encoding.
The serialized JSON form of an Activity Streams 2.0 document MUST be consistent with what would be produced by the standard JSON-LD 1.0 Processing Algorithms and API [[!JSON-LD-API]] Compaction Algorithm using, at least, the normative JSON-LD @context definition provided here. Implementations MAY augment the provided @context with additional @context definitions but MUST NOT override or change the normative context. Implementations MAY also use additional properties and values not defined in the JSON-LD @context with the understanding that any such properties will likely be unsupported and ignored by consuming implementations that use the standard JSON-LD algorithms. See the Extensibility section for more information on handling extensions within Activity Streams 2.0 documents.
JSON-LD uses the special @context
property to define the
processing
context. The value of the @context
property is defined
by the [[JSON-LD]] specification. Implementations producing Activity
Streams 2.0 documents SHOULD include a @context
property
with a value that includes a reference to the normative
Activity Streams 2.0 JSON-LD
@context definition using the URL
"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams
". Implementations
MAY use the alternative URL
"http://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams
"
instead. This can be done using a string, object, or array.
When a JSON-LD enabled Activity Streams 2.0 implementation encounters
a JSON document identified using the
"application/activity+json
" MIME media type, and
that document does not contain a @context
property
whose value includes a reference to the normative
Activity Streams 2.0 JSON-LD
@context definition, the implementation MUST assume that the
normative @context definition still applies.
This specification uses IRIs [[!RFC3987]]. Every URI [[!RFC3986]] is also an IRI, so a URI may be used wherever an IRI is named. There are two special considerations: (1) when an IRI that is not also a URI is given for dereferencing, it MUST be mapped to a URI using the steps in Section 3.1 of [[!RFC3987]] and (2) when an IRI is serving as an "id" value, it MUST NOT be so mapped.
Relative IRI (and URL) references SHOULD NOT be used within an Activity Streams 2.0 document due to the fact that many JSON parser implementations are not capable of reliably preserving the base context necessary to properly resolve relative references.
All properties with date and time values MUST conform to the "date-time" production in [[!RFC3339]] with the one exception that seconds MAY be omitted. An uppercase "T" character MUST be used to separate date and time, and an uppercase "Z" character MUST be used in the absence of a numeric time zone offset.
This is specified using the following [[ABNF]] syntax description. The "time-hour", "time-minute", "time-second", "time-secfrac", "time-offset" and "full-date" constructs are as defined in [[RFC3339]].
as2-partial-time = time-hour ":" time-minute [":" time-second] [time-secfrac] as2-full-time = as2-partial-time time-offset as2-date-time = full-date "T" as2-full-time
It is important to note that the `time-offset` component does not correlate to time-zones, and while times that include the `time-offset` component work well for timestamps, they cannot be reliably converted to and from local "wall times" without additional information and processing.
Following are three examples of activities with varying degrees of detail.
Each example is shown using the normative JSON serialization defined by this specification.
The Activity Vocabulary normatively defines the core object types and properties for Activity Streams 2.0.
The object types defined by the vocabulary are segmented into a set of eight core types and an extended set of Activity and Object types common to many social Web applications. The core types include:
Every JSON object in an Activity Streams 2.0 document is either an
Object
or a Link
. All other types
defined in the Activity Vocabulary, as well as all extension types, are
derived from these two base types.
A JSON object in the Activity Streams 2.0 document is a
Link
if either: (a) the object contains a
type
property whose value includes "Link
" or
(b) any of the types included in the value of the type
property are defined as extensions of Link (see
Mention for
instance); otherwise the JSON object is considered an instance
or extension of Object
.
The Object
is the primary base type for the Activity Streams vocabulary.
In addition to having a global identifier (expressed as an
absolute IRI using the id
property) and an
"object type" (expressed using the type
property), all instances of the Object
type share a
common set of properties normatively defined by the
Activity Vocabulary.
These include:
attachment
|
attributedTo
|
audience
|
content
|
context
|
contentMap
|
name
|
nameMap
|
endTime
|
generator
|
icon
|
image
|
inReplyTo
|
location
|
preview
|
published
|
replies
|
startTime
|
summary
|
summaryMap
|
tag
|
updated
|
url
|
to
|
bto
|
cc
|
bcc
|
mediaType
|
duration
All properties are optional (including the id
and
type
).
The Activity Vocabulary
defines a range of Object
types that are common to
many social Web applications. This specification stops short of
defining semantically specific properties for most of these objects.
External vocabularies can be used to express additional detail not
covered by the Activity Vocabulary.
Furthermore, while implementations are free to introduce new types of Objects beyond those defined by the Activity Vocabulary, interoperability issues can arise when applications rely too much on extension types that are not recognized by other implementations. Care should be taken to not unduly overlap with or duplicate the existing Object types.
When an implementation uses an extension type that overlaps with a core
vocabulary type, the implementation MUST also specify the core vocabulary
type. For instance, some vocabularies (e.g. The Good Relations
Vocabulary) define their own types for describing locations. An
implementation that wishes, for example, to use a
http://purl.org/goodrelations/v1#Location
as an object type MUST also identify the object as being a
Place
as illustrated in the following:
Certain properties defined by some External Vocabularies can overlap or duplicate those defined by the Activity Vocabulary. Where such overlap exists, for the sake of consistent interoperability, implementations MUST favor the use of properties defined by the Activity Vocabulary.
Activity Streams consumers often need a text representation of an Activity Streams object, e.g. for display in a Web browser or console interface.
The name
property SHOULD be derived from input by the creator or another user.
The summary
property SHOULD be used as a fallback text representation, possibly
automatically generated by the publisher. If there is no name
property,
the summary
property SHOULD NOT include markup, and SHOULD be short
enough to be used as a reasonable text representation of the object.
The name
and summary
MAY be absent,
MAY lack explicit values in the end user's current language,
and MAY be longer than appropriate for use as a text representation of
the Object in the current language context. Consumer implementations
SHOULD have fallback strategies for text representation of Objects in
these cases.
A Link
describes a qualified, indirect reference to another
resource that is closely related to the conceptual model of Links as
established in [[!RFC5988]]. The properties of the Link object are not
the properties of the referenced resource, but are provided as hints
for rendering agents to understand how to make use of the resource. For
example, height
and width
might represent the
desired rendered size of a referenced image, rather than the actual
pixel dimensions of the referenced image.
The target URI of the Link is expressed using the required
href
property. In addition, all Link
instances share the
following common set of optional properties as normatively defined by
the Activity Vocabulary:
id
|
name
|
hreflang
|
mediaType
|
rel
|
height
|
width
For example, all Objects can contain an
image
property whose value describes a graphical representation of the
containing object. This property will typically be used to provide the
URL to an image (e.g. JPEG, GIF or PNG) resource that can be displayed
to the user. Any given object might have multiple such visual
representations -- multiple screenshots, for instance, or the same
image at different resolutions. In Activity Streams 2.0, there are
essentially three ways of describing such references.
Formally, the former example establishes an unqualified direct relationship with the image resource while the latter creates a qualified, indirect relationship that allows additional properties about the relationship to be specified.
Individual items contained in such an array are independent of one another and no significance is given to the ordering.
RFC 5988 defines that all Links have a "link relation" that describes
the contextual purpose of the link. Within a Link,
the rel
property
provides the link relation value. If no rel
property is
specified, the link relation is considered to be unspecified. Any given
Link can have multiple link relation values. In the JSON
serialization, a single link relation is expressed as a single JSON
string. Multiple link relations are expressed as an array of JSON
strings.
The scope of the link relation is the object in which the Link is an immediate child.
In the following example, two separate references are provided. The
link relation of the first is unspecified, while the link relation of
the second is "thumbnail
".
It ought to be noted that the [[!HTML5]] specification provides its own alternative definition of a "link relation" that differs slightly from the [[RFC5988]] definition. In the HTML5 definition, any string that does not contain the "space" U+0020, "tab" (U+0009), "LF" (U+000A), "FF" (U+000C), "CR" (U+000D) or "," (U+002C) characters can be used as a valid link relation. To promote interoperability, Activity Streams 2.0 implementations MUST only use link relations that are syntactically valid in terms of both the [[RFC5988]] and [[HTML5]] definitions. Implementations MAY use link relation values that are not registered.
Note that the Link and Object types are disjoint from one another. That is, any given Object cannot also be a Link.
Actor objects are specializations of the base Object
type that represent entities capable of carrying out an
Activity. The Activity
Vocabulary provides the normative definition of five specific
types of Actors:
Application
|
Group
|
Organization
|
Person
|
Service
.
This specification intentionally defines Actors in only the most
generalized way, stopping short of defining semantically specific
properties for each. All Actor objects are specializations of
Object
and inherit all of the core properties
common to all Objects. External vocabularies can be used to express
additional detail not covered by the Activity Vocabulary. VCard
[[vcard-rdf]] SHOULD be used to provide additional metadata for
Person,
Group,
and Organization instances.
While implementations are free to introduce new types of Actors beyond those defined by the Activity Vocabulary, interoperability issues can arise when applications rely too much on extension types that are not recognized by other implementations. Care should be taken to not unduly overlap with or duplicate the existing Actor types.
When an implementation uses an extension type that overlaps with a core
vocabulary type, the implementation MUST also specify the core
vocabulary type. For instance, some vocabularies (e.g. VCard) define
their own types for describing people. An implementation that wishes,
for example, to use a vcard:Individual
as an Actor MUST
also identify that Actor as a Person
as illustrated in the previous example.
Activity objects are specializations of the base Object type that provide information about actions that have either already occurred, are in the process of occurring, or may occur in the future.
In addition to common properties supported by all Object
instances, Activity
objects support the following
additional properties defined by the
Vocabulary:
actor
|
object
|
target
|
origin
|
result
|
instrument
The type
property is used to identify the type
of action the Activity Statement represents.
The Activity Vocabulary
defines a small number of Activity
types that are common
to many social Web applications. This specification stops short of
defining semantically specific properties for most of these activities.
External vocabularies can be used to express additional detail not
covered by the Activity Vocabulary.
While implementations are free to introduce new types of Activites beyond those defined by the Activity Vocabulary, interoperability issues can arise when applications rely too much on extension types that are not recognized by other implementations. Care should be taken to not unduly overlap with or duplicate the existing Activity types.
When an implementation uses an extension type that overlaps with a core
vocabulary type, the implementation MUST also specify the core
vocabulary type. For instance, some vocabularies (e.g. Schema.org)
define their own types for describing actions. An implementation that
wishes, for example, to use http://schema.org/LikeAction
as an Activity MUST also identify that Object as being a
Like
as illustrated in the following:
Implementations are free to use Activity objects in both passive and imperative operations. In the passive sense, the Activity is used to record that an activity has or is occurring. In the imperative sense, the Activity can be used as a form of command, instructing an application to modify state in some manner consistent with the action being described. However, because this specification does not define a normative processing model that constrains how applications make use of the format, the distinction about whether an Activity statement is to be interpreted as a passive notification or as an imperative command can vary across implementations.
IntransitiveActivity objects are specializations of the Activity
type that represent intransitive actions. IntransitiveActivity objects
do not have an object
property.
Collection
objects are a specialization of the
base Object
that serve as a container for other
Objects or Links.
In addition to the base properties inherited by all
Objects
, all
Collection
types contain the additional properties:
items |
totalItems |
first |
last |
current
The items within a Collection
can be ordered or
unordered. The OrderedCollection
type MAY be
used to identify a Collection whose items are always ordered. In the
JSON serialization, the unordered items of a Collection are
represented using the items
property while ordered items
are represented using the orderedItems
property.
A Collection can contain a large number of items. Often, it becomes
impractical for an implementation to serialize every item contained
by a Collection using the items
(or
orderedItems
) property alone. In such cases, the items
within a Collection can be divided into distinct subsets or "pages".
A page is identified using the CollectionPage
type.
The CollectionPage
type extends from the base
Collection
type and inherits all of it's
properties. The following additional properties can also be
specified:
partOf |
next |
prev |
The partOf
property identifies the
Collection
to which the items contained by the
CollectionPage
belong.
The first
, next
, prev
,
last
, and current
properties are used
to reference other CollectionPage
instances
that contain additional subsets of items from the parent collection.
As with Collection
objects, the items within a
CollectionPage
might be ordered or unordered.
The OrderedCollectionPage
type MAY be used
to identify a page whose items are strictly ordered.
The OrderedCollectionPage
type extends from
both CollectionPage
and
OrderedCollection
. In addition to the properties
inherited from each of those, the OrderedCollectionPage
may contain an additional
startIndex
property whose value indicates the relative index position
of the first item contained by the page within the
OrderedCollection
to which the page belongs.
Whether ordered or not, the pages of a Collection
are
typically arranged in a sequence (either a singly or doubly-linked
list). The first
property is used to identify the first
page in this sequence, while the last
property is used
to identify the final page in the sequence. The prev
and
next
properties identify the pages immediately before
and immediately following, respectively.
The current
property identifies a page
containing the subset of items in the Collection
that
have been created or updated most recently.
The values for the first
, last
,
next
, prev
, and current
properties can be either a single CollectionPage
or a Link
referencing a separate resource
containing a CollectionPage
.
Using paging with an OrderedCollection
can be tricky
because there are no guarantees that implementations will process the
sequence of pages in any predictable order. Implementations that wish
to reconstruct the appropriate complete ordering of member items in
the logical collection should navigate to the first (or last)
page in the sequence then recursively follow the next
(or prev
) link until all pages have been processed.
The pages of an OrderedCollection
SHOULD be instances
of OrderedCollectionPage
. If the pages of an
OrderedCollection
are not instances
of OrderedCollectionPage
, a consumer will have
no reliable means of reconstructing the appropriate ordering of items.
Several properties defined by the
Vocabulary are defined
as having natural language values. These are human-readable strings using one or more languages. Within the JSON serialization, they are
expressed as either (1) a single JSON string or (2) a JSON object
mapping well-formed [[!BCP47]] Language-Tags to localized, equivalent
translations of the same string value. In the serialized JSON, these
two forms are differentiated using a simple property naming convention,
for instance: "name
" identifies the JSON string
form for the name
property while "nameMap
" represents the object form.
Every key in the object form MUST be a well-formed [[!BCP47]] Language-Tag. The associated values MUST be strings.
The Activity Vocabulary
defines three properties that use natural language values:
name
,
summary
, and
content
.
Accordingly, in the JSON serialization, the terms
"name
", "summary
", and "content
"
represent the JSON string forms; and the terms
"nameMap
", "summaryMap
", and
"contentMap
" for represent the object forms.
The special language tag "und"
can be used within the
object form to explicitly identify a value whose
language is unknown or undetermined.
When using [[JSON-LD]] mechanisms to produce or consume Activity
Streams 2.0 documents, the @language
property MAY be used
within a @context
to identify the default language. This
mechanism may not be understood by implementations that do not choose
to process Activity Streams 2.0 documents using JSON-LD.
Natural language values within an Activity Streams 2.0 document MAY contain bidirectional text. The default base direction of an Activity Streams 2.0 document is Left-to-Right. The base direction of individual natural language values MAY be modified as described below.
When specifying bidirectional text for a natural language value, and the base direction of the text cannot be correctly identified by the first strong directional character of that text, publishers SHOULD explicitly identify the default direction either by prefixing the value with an appropriate Unicode bidirectional control character, or by using HTML directional markup where permitted.
Consumers of Activity Streams 2.0 documents that contain bidirectional text SHOULD identify the base direction of any given natural language value by either scanning the text for the first strong directional character not contained within a markup tag; or by utilizing directional markup where provided. Once the base direction has been identified, consumers MUST determine the appropriate rendering and display of natural language values, according to the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm [[!BIDI]]. This may necessitate wrapping additional control characters or markup around the string prior to display, in order to apply the base direction.
Property | Value | Direction | Method |
---|---|---|---|
name |
"פעילות הבינאום, W3C" |
Right-to-Left | First strong directional character |
name |
"The document was titled, '\u2067פעילות הבינאום, W3C\u2069'"
|
Left-to-Right | First strong directional character |
name |
"\u200FHTML היא שפת סימון" |
Right-to-Left | Bidi Control Character |
name |
"\u200E'سلام' is hello in Persian." |
Left-to-Right | Bidi Control Character |
summary |
<p dir=\"rtl\">HTML היא שפת סימון>/p>
|
Right-to-Left | HTML Markup |
summary |
<p>פעילות הבינאום, W3C</p> |
Right-to-Left | First strong directional character (ignoring markup) |
summary |
<p title="سلام">Hello</p>
|
Left-to-Right | First strong directional character (ignoring markup) |
Activity Streams 2.0 publishers SHOULD explicitly mark the language of natural language properties if they are known, using either map properties or a default language tag.
Not all examples in this specification explicitly mark the language of natural language properties. This is intentional. The authors and the working group wished to avoid having implementers cut-and-paste examples from the document with explicit language markup as a template for new documents, which would consequently have inaccurate language markup.
In Activity Streams 2.0, an "extension" is any property, activity, actor or object type not defined by the Activity Vocabulary. Consuming implementations that encounter unfamiliar extensions MUST NOT stop processing or signal an error and MUST continue processing the items as if those properties were not present. Note that support for extensions can vary across implementations and no normative processing model for extensions is defined. Accordingly, implementations that rely too heavily on the use of extensions may experience reduced interoperability with other implementations.
For extensions, [[JSON-LD]] is used as the primary mechanism for defining and disambiguating extensions. Implementations that wish to fully support extensions SHOULD use [[JSON-LD]] mechanisms.
Some popular extensions are included in the Activity Streams 2.0 namespace document, and can be reviewed at https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#extensions. The Social Web Incubator Community Group maintains a wiki page on Activity Streams extensions.
It is important to note that the JSON-LD Processing Algorithms [[JSON-LD-API]], as currently defined, will silently ignore any property not defined in a JSON-LD @context. Implementations that publish Activity Streams 2.0 documents containing extension properties SHOULD provide a @context definition for all extensions.
It is also important to note that there are valid JSON constructs which
cannot be used within a JSON-LD document. For instance, JSON-LD forbids
"arrays of arrays" as used, for example, by the popular
GeoJSON specification. While
implementations are free to use such constructs as extensions within an
Activity Streams 2.0 document, consumers that use the standard JSON-LD
Processing Algorithms will be required to either ignore such extensions
or map those to alternative compatible constructs prior to applying the
JSON-LD algorithms. Simple GeoJSON Points, for instance, can be mapped
to Place
objects, while more complex geometries can be converted to
GeoSparql
"Well-Known Text" representations as illustrated in the non-normative
examples below:
The JSON-LD syntax supports the use of "Compact URIs". A "Compact URI" is an
alternative encoding of a URI that uses
a defined prefix to simplify serialization. For instance, the URI
http://example.org/term
can be
represented as ex:term
by assigning the ex:
prefix the value of http://example.org/
Within JSON-LD, Compact URI prefixes are defined within the JSON-LD
@context
definition. For example:
In this example, both the property name term
and the value
ex:Foo
are Compact URIs. The property name term
expands to http://example.org/term
and the value
ex:Foo
expands to http://example.org/Foo
In JSON-LD, Compact URI expansion of values applies to
properties explicitly defined as "type": "id"
in the
@context
definition. Specifically, Compact URIs can be used
anywhere an IRI (or URI) value is expected.
Activity Streams 2.0 implementations that wish to fully support extensions
MUST support Compact URI expansion as defined by the JSON-LD specification.
Such expansion applies to all property names as well as all property values
explicitly defined as type @id
in the JSON-LD @context.
Over reliance on the Compact URI form can lead to ambiguity and
interoperability issues between implementations. Therefore, Compact URI use
SHOULD be avoided in all cases other than property names and the value(s)
of the type
property.
Implementations that use JSON-LD mechanisms to parse and then reserialize Activity Streams 2.0 documents that contain extension properties SHOULD take sufficient care to ensure that extension properties used within the original document are preserved and serialized appropriately.
For instance, consider the following simple Activity Stream object
containing hypothetical foo
and bar
extension
properties. The foo
extension is defined within the
JSON-LD @context
while the bar
extension
property is not.
An implementation that receives this Note object can choose to parse the object as an ordinary JSON object or it can use the standard JSON-LD Expansion algorithm.
If the implementation chooses to parse the object as ordinary JSON
and then reserializes the object (e.g. for storage or redistribution),
then it would simply preserve the values of the @context
,
foo
and bar
properties as they are and
include those in the reserialized output.
However, if the implementation chooses to use the JSON-LD expansion
algorithm, the @context
will be removed from the expanded
result and the bar
property will be mapped to the
"blank node" _:bar
. If this document is then reserialized
using the normative Activity Streams 2.0 context, the JSON-LD
compacted form would be:
While this is close to the original, the use of fully expanded URI
label for the foo
property is not ideal. To ensure that
the reserialized object is serialized correctly, implementations that
perform JSON-LD expansion of received documents SHOULD preserve the
original @context
used when performing the JSON-LD
expansion, then reuse that when reserializing the object into the
JSON-LD compacted form.
Activity Streams 2.0 documents can (and likely will) contain potentially sensitive personal information such as identity, contact information, physical location, physical characteristics, and so forth. Furthermore, Activity data, in general, can be analyzed to generate profiles of the behavior of individual or groups of Actors.
Implementations that produce or consume Activity Streams 2.0 documents MUST take steps to openly and publicly document and communicate to all potential users: (a) the kinds of potentially sensitive personal information published, consumed or collected by the implementation, (b) the reasons for publishing, consuming and collecting that information, (c) the manner in which that information is being used, (d) the identity of any other party with whom that information is being shared, and (e) the reason the information is being shared with other parties.
Implementations that publish Activity Streams 2.0 documents SHOULD assume a default position of limiting both the kind and amount of sensitive personal information included in the document unless users have "opted in" to sharing additional detail.
Implementations that consume Activity Streams 2.0 documents SHOULD NOT, by default, store or share sensitive personal information included within consumed documents unless users have "opted in" to allowing that information to be stored or shared.
In this context, "opting in" does not necessarily require explicit action on the part of the user. If, for instance, the use of certain sensitive personal information is clearly implicit in the use of an implementation (a location tracking service, for example), then any use of that implementation can be considered an implicit acknowledgement that the sensitive personal information will be used and shared so long as the documentation guidelines listed above are followed.
Publishers or Consumers implementing Activity Streams as a stream of public data may also want to consider the potential for unsolicited commercial or malicious content and should take preventative measures to recognize such content and either identify it or not include it in their implementations.
Publishers should take reasonable measures to ensure potentially malicious user input such as cross-site scripting attacks are not included in the Activity Streams data they publish.
Consumers that re-emit ingested content to end-users MUST take reasonable measures if emitting ingested content to make sure potentially malicious ingested input is not re-emitted.
Consumers that re-emit ingested content for crawling by search engines should take reasonable measures to limit any use of their site as a Search Engine Optimization loophole. This may include converting untrusted hyperlinks to text or including a rel="nofollow" attribute.
Consumers should be aware of the potential for spoofing attacks where the attacker publishes activities or objects with falsified property values with the intent of injecting malicious content, hiding or corrupting legitimate content, or misleading users.
Activity Streams are JSON Documents and are subject to the same security considerations described in [[!RFC7159]].
Activity Streams implementations handle URIs. See Section 7 of [[!RFC3986]].
Activity Streams implementations handle IRIs. See Section 8 of [[!RFC3987]].
application/activity+json
Media Type
This specification registers the application/activity+json
MIME Media Type specifically for identifying documents
conforming to the Activity Streams 2.0 format.
Type name: | application |
Subtype name: | activity+json |
Required parameters: | None |
Optional parameters: |
profile: The profile parameter for the application/activity+json
media type allows one or more profile URIs to be specified. These
profile URIs have the identifier semantics defined in [[!RFC6906]].
The "profile" media type parameter MUST be quoted. It contains a
non-empty list of space-separated URIs (the profile URIs).
profile-param = "profile=" profile-value profile-value = <"> profile-URI 0*( 1*SP profile-URI ) <"> profile-URI = URI">">The "URI" in the above grammar refers to the "URI" as defined in Section 3 of [[!RFC3986]]. |
Encoding considerations: |
Resources that use the "application/activity+json "
Media Type are required to conform to all of the requirements
for the "application/json " Media Type and are
therefore subject to the same encoding considerations specified
in Section 11 of [[!RFC7159]].
|
Security considerations: | As defined in this specification. |
Contact: | James M Snell <jasnell@gmail.com> |
Note that while the Activity Streams 2.0 format uses JSON-LD conventions, there are a number of constraints and additional requirements for Activity Streams 2.0 implementations that justify the use of a specific media type.
Because Activity Streams 2.0 can be considered a restricted profile of JSON-LD, Implementations SHOULD consider the `application/ld+json; profile="https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams"` media type as being equivalent to `application/activity+json`.
All diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative, as are all sections explicitly marked non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative.
Conforming documents are those that comply with all the conformance criteria for documents. For readability, some of these conformance requirements are phrased as conformance requirements on publishers; such requirements are implicitly requirements on documents: by definition, all documents are assumed to have a publisher.
Conforming documents must not include deprecated or obsolete syntax from Activity Streams 1.0. Conforming documents must include properties and types from the Activity Vocabulary. Conforming documents that use other vocabularies must also include equivalent Activity Vocabulary properties and types as illustrated in Section C. Conforming documents must not use features of JSON-LD or other serialization features disallowed in this specification, as in Section 2. Conforming documents that include types or properties beyond those defined in the Activity Streams 2.0 Vocabulary must use the extensibility features defined in section 5.
A non-exhaustive list of examples of documents includes:
Conforming implementations are software that publish, store, analyze, consume or otherwise process conforming documents. The two main kinds of implementations are publishers and consumers.
Conforming publishers are implementations that create and publish conforming documents. Conforming publishers must make conforming documents available according to the serialization requirements of section 2. Conforming publishers must consider privacy as described in section 6. Conforming publishers must consider security as described in section 7.
A non-exhaustive list of example publishers includes:
Conforming consumers are implementations that read and analyze conforming documents. Conforming consumers must tolerate deprecated or obsolete properties or types from Activity Streams 1.0. Conforming consumers must ignore properties or types that are not applicable to their application domain.
Conforming consumers may re-publish conforming documents in other other data formats. Conforming consumers may present conforming documents to a user on screen, in print, in audio format, or using other presentation mechanisms. Conforming consumers must faithfully translate the information represented in conforming documents into these other formats or media. Conforming consumers that re-publish conforming documents must consider privacy as described in section 6 and security as described in section 7.
A non-exhaustive list of example consumers includes:
The Activity Streams 2.0 specification is a product of the W3C Social Web Working Group. The editors thank all of the Working Group members who contributed to the conversations, issues and testing that helped shape the current specification.
The editor's also wish to thank all of those who contributed to Activity Streams prior to the specification being picked up as a contribution to the W3C Social Web Working Group. Activity Streams 1.0 was a community driven effort and the specification would not be where it is today without the earlier contributions from the community, including, but not limited to: Abdul Qabiz, Adina Levin, Adrian Chan, Adriana Javier, Alan Hoffman, Alex Kessinger, Alexander Ovchinnikov, Alexander Zhuravlev, Alexandre Loureiro Solleiro, Amy Walgenbach, Andres Vidal, Angel Robert Marquez, Ari Steinberg, Arjan Scherpenisse, Arne Roomann-Kurrik, Beau Lebens, Ben Hedrington, Ben Metcalfe, Ben Werdmuller, Benjamin Goering, Bill de hOra, Bo Xing, Bob Aman, Bob Wyman, Brett Slatkin, Brian Walsh, Brynn Evans, Charlie Cauthen, Chris Chabot, Chris Messina, Chris Toomey, Christian Crumlish, Dan Brickley, Dan Scott, Daniel Chapman, Danny Ayers, Dare Obasanjo, Darren Bounds, David Cramer, David Nelson, David Recordon, DeWitt Clinton, Douglas Pearce, Ed Summers, Elias Bizannes, Elisabeth Norris, Eric Marcoullier, Eric Woods, Evan Prodromou, Gee-Hsien Chuang, Greg Biggers, Gregory Foster, Henry Saputra, Hillary Madsen, Howard Liptzin, Hung Tran, Ian Kennedy, Ian Mulvany, Ivan Pulleyn, Jacob Kim, James Falkner, James Pike, James Walker, Jason Kahn, Jason Kantz, Jeff Kunins, Jeff Martin, Jian Lin, Johannes Ernst, John Panzer, Jon Lebkowsky, Jon Paul Davies, Jonathan Coffman, Jonathan Dugan, Joseph Boyle, Joseph Holsten, Joseph Smarr, Josh Brewer, Jud Valeski, Julien Chaumond, Julien Genestoux, Jyri Engestroem, Kaliya Hamlin, Kevin Marks, Laurent Eschenauer, Laurie Voss, Leah Culver, Libby Miller, Manu Mukerji, Mark Weitzel, Marko Degenkolb, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Martin Atkins, Martin Svensson, Marty Alchin, Mary Hoder, Matt Leventi, Matt Wilkinson, Matthias Mueller-Prove, Max Engel, Max Wegmueller, Melvin Carvalho, Michael Buckbee, Michael Chan, Michael Richardson, Michael Sullivan, Mike Macgirvin, Mislav Marohnić, Mo Jangda, Monica Wilkinson, Nate Benes, NeilFred Picciotto, Nick Howard, Nick Lothian, Nissan Dookeran, Nitya Narasimhan, Pablo Martin, Padraic Brady, Pat Cappelaere, Patrick Aljord, Peter Ferne, Peter Reiser, Peter Saint-Andre, Phil Wolff, Philip (flip) Kromer, Richard Cunningham, Richard Zhao, Rick Severson, Robert Hall, Robert Langbert, Robert Dolin, Robin Cover, Ryan Boyd, Sam Sethi, Scott Raymond, Scott Seely, Simon Grant, Simon Wistow, Stephen Garcia, Stephen Sisk, Stephen Paul Weber, Steve Ivy, Steve Midgley, Steven Livingstone-Perez, Sylvain Carle, Sylvain Hellegouarch, Tantek Çelik, Tatu Saloranta, Tim Moore, Timothy Young, Todd Barnard, Tosh Meston, Tyler Gillies, Will Norris, Zach Copley, Laurent-Walter Goix, Matthew Marum, Andy Smith, and Zach Shepherd.
Note: While this appendix sections is non-normative, it uses normative terms such as MUST. Where used, the meaning is to indicate what would be required to properly implement the Activity Streams 1.0 backwards compatibility model described in this appendix if an implementer chose to do so.
While the syntax defined by this specification diverges from that defined by JSON Activity Streams 1.0, the fundamental model defined by that original specification remains intact. Specific processing rules are defined by this specification that allow existing Activity Streams 1.0 documents to be mapped to and processed as an Activity Streams 2.0 document.
The JSON syntax defined by this specification differs somewhat from that defined in the original JSON Activity Streams 1.0 [[AS1]] specification in ways that are not backwards compatible. Implementations can choose to continue supporting the JSON Activity Streams 1.0 syntax but ought consider it to be deprecated. This means that while implementations can continue to consume the 1.0 syntax, they should not output the 1.0 syntax unless specifically interacting with older non-2.0 compliant implementations.
Specifically:
application/stream+json
" MIME
media type when producing a JSON serialization using the Activity
Streams 1.0 syntax, and "application/activity+json
"
when producing a serialization conforming to the 2.0 syntax.
application/stream+json
" or the more
generic "application/json
" MIME media type MUST follow
the syntax and processing rules set by [[AS1]]. The 2.0
syntax and processing rules apply only when handling
serializations using the "application/activity+json
" media
type.
id
as an alias for the
JSON-LD @id
key word; and the objectType
and
verb
properties as aliases for the JSON-LD
@type
keyword.
displayName
property which
has been renamed to name
in Activity Streams 2.0.
Implementations ought to treat displayName
as an alias
for name
.
title
property which has
been dropped from Activity Streams 2.0. Implementations processing
Activity Streams 1.0 documents as Activity Streams 2.0 ought to treat
instances of the title
property as an extension.
content
and
summary
properties as natural language values which means their values can be expressed
as either a string or an object mapping language tags to string values.
In the 1.0 syntax, these are expressed solely as String values. Because
the 1.0 values are a valid subset allowed by this specification,
implementations are not required to take any specific action to continue
supporting those values.
upstreamDuplicates
and
downstreamDuplicates
properties defined by Activity Streams
1.0 and does not provide a replacement. This is due largely to lack of any
reasonable implementation evidence. While the
upstreamDuplicates
and downstreamDuplicates
properties MAY continue to be used, implementations SHOULD avoid them.
post
" verb was defined to
describe the action of both creating an object and "posting" or uploading
it to a service. This specification replaces the "post
" verb
with separate
Create
and
Add
Activity types. When processing Activity Streams 1.0 documents and
converting those into 2.0, implementations SHOULD treat instances of the
"post
" verb as equivalent to
Create
if there is no target
property specified; and
equivalent to
Add
if there is a target
property specified.
By following these guidelines, all JSON Activity Streams 1.0 serializations can be processed successfully by 2.0 implementations.
It is possible use multiple vocabularies to cover particular characteristics of the activities like data provenance and annotations, which can compliment the Activity Vocabulary. For example: Eric writes a short note to be shared with his followers. After posting the note, he notices a spelling error. He edits the note and re-posts it. Later, Eric decides that the information in the note is incorrect. He deletes the note.
The following notable changes have been made to this document since the previous candidate recommendation of 2016-12-15.
CollectionPage
properties.