I'm glad that you see it positively Ryan. 
I guess your concern is regarding the semantics of the activities, that might 
vary from application to application a little bit. 
However, from my perspective Shindig as a central unit should also have some 
kind of harmonization role regarding semantics. I think it is helpful to have a 
consistent set of well-defined activities and hide system-specifics up to a 
certain amount. 
I would provide a text-file with suggestions for English and German and every 
administrator that uses Shindig would be free to alter them for their setup or 
add those files for different languages. I can also imagine the Shindig 
community providing two or three different versions of that file depending on 
the application scenario like company intranets (our use case) or internet 
communities (maybe semantics are different in this case).

Finally, the feature should be configurable so it can be turned on and off by 
the administrator and of course it should not overwrite existing title 
attributes coming from the database. With these two mechanisms in place, 
everybody should be happy from my perspective. People who don't like the 
feature simply turn it off. Others that have applications in place that set the 
title on their own don't have to fear that the new feature will interfere with 
those and all the other don't have to implement own code for creating the 
natural language strings.

Please find enclosed a document that describes how we use the general 
activitystrea.ms verbs in our use case. SCHub is the project acronym denoting 
Social Collaboration Hub. That might further clarify things.


-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Ryan Baxter [mailto:rbaxte...@gmail.com] 
Gesendet: Montag, 1. Dezember 2014 22:39
An: dev@shindig.apache.org
Betreff: Re: Natural language version of activities in Shindig

Makes sense Rene thanks.  But what I don't understand is how you propose 
Shindig be able to translate the activity, would the app creating the activity 
provide the translation?

On Mon, Dec 1, 2014 at 12:57 PM, René Peinl <rene.pe...@hof-university.de> 
wrote:
> Dear Ryan,
> Sorry that my description was not precise enough.
> What I want to achieve is: store <actor>, <verb>, <object>, and 
> <target> of an activity in Shindig and when retrieving the activity get a 
> JSON that delivers the stored values and in addition includes the title 
> attribute with something like {
>    "language": "en",
>    "title":"<actor> renamed document <object> into <target>"
> }
> Shindig should use a lookup table that has a natural language template per 
> activity verb.
>
> With real data instead of placeholders this would look like {
>    "language": "en",
>    "title": "Peter renamed document 'meeting protocol2.pdf' into 'meeting 
> protocol for second project review.pdf'"
> }
>
> I hope that helps. If not, please try to rephrase what you understood, so 
> that I can see where exactly the problem with understanding is.
> Regards
> René
>
> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: Ryan Baxter [mailto:rbaxte...@gmail.com]
> Gesendet: Montag, 1. Dezember 2014 17:18
> An: dev@shindig.apache.org
> Cc: Florian Holzschuher; Christian Ochsenkühn
> Betreff: Re: Natural language version of activities in Shindig
>
> Hi Rene,
>
> Can you provide a more concrete example of what you are trying to do?
> I am having a hard time grasping your question.
>
> On Mon, Dec 1, 2014 at 7:47 AM, René Peinl <rene.pe...@hof-university.de> 
> wrote:
>> Dear Shindig community,
>>
>> we are facing a challange in our project, that we are using Shindig 
>> to collect activities from various systems and want to show 
>> activities coming from Shindig in every system. Currently Shindig 
>> only delivers the basic activity data like activity verb, object, target and 
>> so on.
>> However, we’d like to show a natural language version of the activity 
>> in the activity stream (full sentence) which includes multi-lingual 
>> presentation of the contents. An example would be „<actor> has added 
>> a comment to <object>“ or „<actor> renamed document <object> into 
>> <target>“. The activitystrea.ms standard specifies the title attribute for 
>> that purpose.
>>
>>  <http://activitystrea.ms/specs/json/1.0/#activity>
>> http://activitystrea.ms/specs/json/1.0/#activity
>>
>> In Shindig this attribute attribute is present and handled, but only 
>> in a pass-through manner.
>>
>>
>>
>> In order to avoid duplication of code, our natural choice would be to 
>> extend Shindig to generate the natural language version of the 
>> activities in the title attribute, if title is not present in the 
>> database. We would use files for translation and formatting templates 
>> (only string formatting, not colouring or layout), so that every 
>> administrator can influence both without any coding.
>>
>>
>>
>> Would this be an interesting extension for the Shindig base system 
>> and do you have any suggestions on how to integrate such an extension 
>> from an architecture point of view? We are e.g. not sure whether to 
>> deliver several translation in the same JSON as shown here
>>
>>
>> <http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-activitystreams-core-20141023/#naturalL
>> a
>> nguage
>> Values>
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-activitystreams-core-20141023/#naturalLa
>> n
>> guageV
>> alues
>>
>> or use a parameter from the client to choose the language.
>>
>> My guess would be that other people will face similar problems.
>>
>>
>>
>> Regards
>>
>> René
>>
>>
>>
>

Attachment: ActivityStream_Verbs.docx
Description: MS-Word 2007 document

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