Examples of potential new object types in Activity Streams

The examples below are predicated on the view that tools like QA will be providing access to catalogers working in a Bibframe/RDF environment to two types of data:

Access to traditional authority records
Access to entity descriptions

Traditional authority records are concerned with establishing a unique "heading" as the authorized identifier of a person, a concept, etc., and to provide a link from alternative forms to the authorized form. The authorized heading also serves the function of collocating related records within a library collection as well as across collections.

Entity descriptions, on the other hand, have a broader scope. They encompass all sorts of metadata related to an entity. Preferred label and alternative labels could be part of the description, but many other properties and relationships could be included as well. These descriptions could serve as building blocks in entity-based cataloging. A cataloger could pick and choose specific properties from an entity description and combine them with other entity descriptions to produce a "record" for a bibliographic resource.

Entities are uniquely identified by URIs instead of authorized headings. When this substitution of authorized headings with URIs becomes widespread in library metadata, and the URIs subsume the roles of identifier and collocation device in library catalogs, then the need for everyone using the same complex, carefully crafted label would diminish, and along with that the need for traditional authority records.

But the process described above is going to take some time to develop. In the meantime, we'll still need to use authorized headings in our cataloging because our discovery system is still reliant on that consistent form of heading for searching and collocation. However, we are switching to entity-based cataloging, which means that our catalogers would need access to entity descriptions, in addition to authority records. Therefore, I think QA might want to classify the sources that it provides access to along those lines.

Object typing could be a way to make this distinction between objects that are authority records and objects that are more general entity descriptions in activity streams. Below is a stab at this classification.

Object type	Authority	Entity
Subtypes	Name	Person
	Uniform title	Collective agent
	Series	Work
	Subject	Instance
		Place
		Event

A source's activity stream may already be based on a subtype (e.g. authority/subject). In that case, it may be unnecessary to specify an object type at the item level. But if an activity stream includes multiple subtypes, then disclosing the object's type at the item level could be useful for downstream consumers.

With the above as context, here are some examples (copied and modified from one of Lynette's examples):

Example 1
{

"@context": https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams,

"updated": "2021-08-02T16:59:54Z"

"type": "Update",

"id": https://data.my.authority/change_documents/2021/activity-stream/cd31,

"partOf": {

"type": "OrderedCollectionPage",

"id": https://data.my.authority/change_documents/2021/activity-stream/page/2,

},

"object": {

"type": "Name",