@jenniferplusplus @trwnh
But your application probably only cares about or understands a subset of all the terms in use and it makes sense to use a schema to rigorously validate the things you support and ignore the rest.

@jenniferplusplus @trwnh
So the problem the semantic stuff is trying to solve is how to have an extensible standard without causing chaos, e.g. if two different implementations decide to add a field called "grilledCheese" but actually each one uses it to mean different things with different structure. Then the semantic markup lets you tell them apart.

@jenniferplusplus
this is incomplete and broken but if it was more complete and less broken and could be used to generate C# code, would it be useful?

https://gist.github.com/tetron/2714b63983063548af4705a7cf9defa2

@jenniferplusplus
So if we're talking about https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/
there is a machine readable formal model under there, it is just defined in OWL. I don't offhand know of tools that take in OWL and give you data models in more practical languages but that doesn't mean they don't exist. For ActivityStreams specifically it doesn't look like it would be all that hard.
At this rate I'm going to talk myself into writing a proof of concept, which is dangerous.

@jenniferplusplus
So I'm writing from the perspective of the particular thing I linked earlier but I just want to mention a couple of things it has:

a) code generators for a bunch of languages including C#, which use the schema to write the data structures and parsing/validation for you, which is very fast and there's no lunacy like having to transit through an rdf triple store

b) knowing which fields are identifiers or references to other things has some nice properties for validation

@jenniferplusplus
So the irony is that linked data semantic web stuff is totally designed for annotating external resources the way you want, but only if the resource itself has a linked data mapping (i.e. there's way to refer to individual elements in the document), and schema documents written with json schema don't. Which is why the schemas need to be linked data themselves. Cue the endless screaming.

@jenniferplusplus
I'm not very familiar with the ActivityPub spec but this is about AP isn't it?

@jenniferplusplus
I think you want something like a json-ld context, which describes how json fields map to semantic nodes without necessarily specifying a schema, but even then it is hard to avoid asserting schema-like details such as whether a field takes a single value or an array of values.

But ultimately it is a problem for the schema design, because common anti patterns like reusing the same field name to mean different things in different contexts make it challenging to assign semantics.

@jenniferplusplus

You might find this interesting:

https://github.com/common-workflow-language/schema_salad

Basically everything defined in the schema has a corresponding semantic node, documents are written in YAML but have a corresponding rdf representation, and robust support for including fields outside the core vocabulary in an unambiguous way

@futurebird
By definition, a fair coin has to flip heads eventually, the sequence of tails can't be infinite, that isn't a fair coin.

How many sequential tail flips do you need to get before you can choose between it being a low-probability event and actually not a fair coin?