Change-log: 2021-06-01

We have made some changes to the Notify documentation. The changes are to improve the notification payloads in terms of linked data (ensuring that they can be expressed as RDF) and so the changes should not have any breaking impact on current software development.

1. Context

The structure of the notification payloads is essentially unchanged, except that we have created a first draft Notify JSON-LD context (http://purl.org/coar/notify), and changed the example JSON-LD in the patterns and scenarios to reflect this. All patterns now have this as the context property:

{
  "@context": [
    "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
    "http://purl.org/coar/notify"
  ]
}
2. Strictness of the descriptions

The descriptions of the payloads were previously described in strict, 'IETF' language (e.g. MUST, SHOULD etc.). This language implied a strict 'schema' which is not really the case here, since we are working in a linked-data paradigm. It became clear that the imposition of a pseudo schema could have unforeseeable consequences in later re-use of the patterns. We expect these patterns to evolve with use, as the community becomes more skilled and ambitions in their application.

As such, these patterns are best thought of as conventions, rather than standards, relying on the underlying standards of W3C LDN, W3C Activity Streams 2.0 et. al.

For this reason, we have relaxed the language used to describe the patterns. However, the structures and patterns described have not changed (with the exception of the @context property as described above.

Changes