Assignment 8: Vocabulary Integration

In this assignment, we want you to talk to other teams and find at least two services (i.e., activities) that you can make use of to improve or extend your own project. These two services must be provisioned by a different group! In order to help communications, you need to document your activities using the "Activity Streams Documentation Language (ASDL)". The documentation of the project groups will be made available at http://dret.net/lectures/iot-spring15/asdl/, which serves as the "clearinghouse" of the AS services provided by the project groups.

You can use the ASDL documentation for the AS1 base schema as starting point. This is a rather lengthy ASDL, because the base schema has numerous verbs, object types, and object properties. You have probably much fewer than that, so your ASDL will be short. ASDL uses MD syntax, so writing it is easy. You need to do two things:

• ASDL contains a summary of the AS concepts you are publishing (verbs, object types, object properties). Each concept should be described listing its identifier, a short description, and a link to the actual documentation.
• At a web site of your choice, provide the actual documentation of the concepts, so that people can follow the link from the short ASDL description, and find the more detailed documentation that puts it in context. You can be brief, but we want to create the two-step idea of the registry (the ASDL) and the actual documentation (your own web site).

Throughout A8, we will continually update the ASDL as it is made available by project groups, and they are responsible for publishing and updating the documentation on their web sites. The, when using other groups' activities, be creative! You can, for instance:

• Try to convince the other group that the way you want to consume their service is better than their current implementation, and get them to change the vocabulary and/or activities used by their activity sources.
• Be convinced by them to change your activity consumers.
• Negotiate a compromise on the vocabulary and activities.
• Create a transformer service that integrates services across projects (by consuming activities from ASbase and re-publishing to it)

The deliverable for this assignment is a paper that explain which activities (from other groups!) you are planning to use, why you decided to use them, and how that changes the service/application that your project is producing. You should look at this paper as your own description of what you have to implement for assignment 9, so be careful and specific and realistic about the things that you describe.

Furthermore, if your paper describe things that other projects will have to change about their activities, make sure that they agree and explicitly describe the changes from the status quo to the new activities that the two teams have agreed on.