W3C OpenActive Community Group, 18 Nov 2020

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From YouTube: OpenActive W3C Community Call / 2020-11-18

Description

Accessibility Specification

- Proposal
- Modelling

A

Okay, uh welcome to the call uh for the 18th of november 2020, um we'll just be talking about um aspects of the accessibility specification, or rather the bit of the opportunity specification. That's concerned with accessibility, um I'll just start showing the screen here.

A

Suddenly, quite popular on instant messaging.

A

B

A

For some reason, there's reluctance to share what are you looking at right now, nick? Can you see my.

C

I've just got a little a little twistly um spinner.

D

A

Has that improved? Can you see the slides now yep yeah, okay, great okay? So these are not really about the the meat of the accessibility specification. This is more kind of uh one might say: sort of admin, details uh or um standards, details about the standard and um formal characteristics. I suppose.

A

So, just as a little bit of a refresher, this is an example of what the accessibility information would look like attached to an opportunity.

A

There's three components to it, one of which is simply transport. Note, um simply because uh research indicates that information about in particular, public transport is quite valuable for people with accessibility needs. um Accessibility, support level is a small, controlled vocabulary with. I think three values indicating how much support people can expect if they attend the opportunity and then most of the meat of it is in the accessibility support object, which is an array of complex objects, each of which the intention is to describes some particular accessibility feature in a fairly high degree of detail.

A

So the idea is that, if you had, I don't know four or five accessibility features. You'd have four or five of those objects in that array. um So the open questions with regard to this, the first one is just about information repetition. um If you look at the example, you can see that there is a slot there in accessibility, support for contact point and again this was something that kind of was was flagged up by sport.

A

England, research, particularly that often people with accessibility needs really want to talk to somebody, or at least email somebody and get a very detailed sense um of what's involved and get some reassurance that they'll be they'll, be their needs will be met.

A

So a contact point is very important.

A

um Similarly carer policy for people who need somebody to be in attendance at the time, um it's important to to know whether that person needs to pay and so on and so forth, um and indeed it's sometimes a venues that are interested in supporting people with accessibility needs will often have um you know, free amenities for for carers, and that kind of thing, so it would even be an advertising point.

A

um The difficulty, I guess is that this could be attached at a couple of points in the hierarchy and yeah. It's kind of it could get extremely repetitive. um So, for instance, I was looking at the active places. The way they represent, disability information or other accessibility features um and they've got a fairly fine-drained data that they capture you know, it'll be. Are there accessible toilets? Is the parking accessible? Are all the doorways? You know level um nine particular features that they model for every leisure center, um which would be eight or nine accessibility.

A

Support objects in that array, um but presumably in many cases there'd only be one contact point for all of those or there'd be at most two um and that's the policy would be global across all of those. So I'm just not too sure how to slice the pie there.

C

Is it just the case that the contact point sits at the same level as accessibility support as like an accessibility contact point or some something.

A

Yeah, I guess that's the question. um I guess that raises two issues, and one would be um if, in the case where there's one contact point across all of them, that works fine. um What if you've got two? I suppose that if you, if you had say somebody who's in charge of sensory disabilities and the support there and um mobility disabilities and support they're lining them up to be a bit difficult.

C

Well, I I yeah it's in it's yeah, I suppose there's an interesting thing here about like the level of kind of um like how much we care about making this data. Like you know super.

C

um uh I guess I guess it's like like overfitting the model almost like is there risk of that, for example, is it really the case that, like in most cases, you just want to kind of list of the accessibility contacts anyway, because there's usually going to be one or two of them and they probably both do each other's jobs a little bit anyway, and maybe they job share, and you know it from a practical perspective.

C

um If there's a team, they've probably got a contact point, you know, there's um so uh or, like you know, single a single um number. You can call, or maybe a shared email address. So maybe you know if um yeah, maybe maybe we don't need to worry so much about that. Maybe you know, there's just an array of contact point and you just make sure that instrument available or contact typers you've got there uh that you just say what what that is, and then they can figure it out themselves.

C

Just thinking about whether I would be kind of written on the page. You've just got like a list of contacts, accessibility, contacts.

A

Yeah and yeah, and indeed would presumably be fairly fairly obvious from the description or even if you contacted them, I'm sure it would be a question of you know them forwarding you to the right person rather than everything falling apart. At that point,.

C

But that's it like, I suppose the question here really um is what you know: what the vet, what do we by adding the extra granularity here to the fields? What are we? What are we enabling to happen? So I guess the driving force between, but behind a lot of the fields that have been added over time to um the kind of beta and things like that is usually being not around. We need more free text, but actually we need there's a specific type of searchable thing, or you know something that has has meaning.

C

uh That's that that needs to be added. um You know like a video or something um we can't. We can't deal with within the current thing, but any extra um free text is just kind of yeah. Just stick that in description. Stick that in the additional information um fields so yeah. I guess to that end- maybe maybe something similar applies here. It's like if we're adding um additional fields.

C

Maybe it's just thinking about each one really um kind of uh conservatively um about whether that's that's like what it's, if it's necessary, what the value it adds over. You know what we're going to write in the description um anyway. Sorry, that's a slight tangential point, but that's yeah so and therefore things like contact point yeah. We don't need to be so specific about.

C

For the same reason,.

A

I think, in terms of ui, it's about being able to separate out the accessibility, information and present it as a distinct kind of information. um Yeah.

C

A

Description, or rather having a description under accessibility support makes sense. Yes, because it's you know it is specific to that domain, um but yeah at the level of carer policy. Yeah. It's not it's not as though there's going to be a machine actionable kind of action you can take based on.

C

Based on that right, exactly that's the thing! So yeah, it's it's it's almost! Yes, there are um yeah. I mean if it's just two freight free text fields, for example, then the people who are presenting the information need to think about how to separate those out and provide headings, and things like that. Yeah.

B

C

So it could, because free text is just a bit more awkward to um to present really if you've got one description field that can be formatted, that's quite nice kind of open to most people's whatever they're capturing. But anyway that's yeah. That's an aside! So but there's.

A

Only one it's tricky with accessibility too, because it is so fine-grained in a way, and it is so individual that often free text is kind of what the solution looks like.

B

A

Yeah, the kinds of the kinds of remediations you make for somebody with um say social or behavioral needs are so different from what you make. Yes, mobility needs it it does. It is very blobby that way, yeah and in a way, it's kind of like it's almost like html divs is what you're, what you're describing in the end.

C

Yeah, and also of course, we've got to be, we've got to bear in mind that there's going to be people with with this accessibility issues, reading the content so actually yeah having it separated, not formatted. It's probably is it's probably right: are they all the fields in there? The name description are they? Is that uh complete, or is that more?

C

A

So um that's great! No, it's a little small can.

C

A

But yeah it's it's not it's sort of intentionally fairly small, because we actually don't have a lot of data to leverage a lot of the time and we need to give people realistic goals about what they're, what they're going to capture? That's great um sure, okay, I know we've gone a bit off. uh Oh sorry, sorry one one that isn't on there is ours available.

A

um In the case, um uh often equipment like pool, hoists and stuff needs specialized stuff too to operate it, um and so there's that's not represented here, but yeah, there's not much more to it than what you see here.

C

So if you, if you have like what british cycling have, which is a general statement of accessibility, that just says basically call this number for your needs, because we haven't got the information, but we want to support you. um Where would you put that information in this structure.

A

um I think in that structure it would probably be well. I guess that's a question about contact point then, um if it's, if because it applies across several, it should go at a higher level.

A

um Do we also support it at the lower level, in which case you've got two things you have to parse in order to make sure you've got a contact point.

C

Oh, no, so sorry, sorry, I would suggest yeah. So I was suggesting if we, if we went with kind of accessibility contact point as an array of contact points um at the like event level, I guess and the same level as accessibility support exists.

C

um But then I mean I mean if we did that or if we didn't you've still got. The point of the question of someone wants to write a description about general accessibility approach or policy, but I guess this is an array and it's got a name. um So if, if there's a thing that doesn't really have a name, it's just a general description. Are you thinking that it's uh just got no name field, just a description uh single element in the array type thing.

A

Yeah I mean, I think there'd probably still be a name and that you'd probably call it accessibility, general support or something I mean I would. I would assume there would be some kind of way to refer to it that you'd want but yeah. It would just be a general statement.

A

Okay, um I think that would work out you know and then the description this would be for uh for further information. You know we. We are happy to support individuals depending on their needs. Please contact us, you know to discuss this further. I guess something along those lines. Sure.

C

Hang on what's going on here, sorry give me one second time.

C

Sorry, all right.

A

Everything: okay.

C

My um yeah yeah um nish uh has a power plant power outage today in his village, which obviously means everyone working from home hasn't it. So I just got a phone call from him and then it's very hard to discern from his zero communication today, whether that was an urgent problem or what oh right, it's all. Fine. Sorry can you please continue.

A

um Okay, so I think I think that's so your recommendation, I guess, would be yes a distinct kind of contact. Point accessibility, contact point um living one level up yeah. I think that seems that seems fair and then I guess only only at that level um so that you're not parsing it further down the down the tree.

C

Yeah, uh I think so well.

B

C

Alternative is that you only have it at the next level down, and then uh I guess I just don't. I don't know what the data looks like, because how many of these are there going to be? I think I think that level above is probably I mean, given the scarcity of the data. I think the level of up is probably the right thing. We can always add an extra level of detail later.

A

Yeah, I think I think the problem is actually that the data is very spread that or rather not spread but polarized in the sense that there's most, you know, leisure centers, supporting organizations that don't have a clear way to represent this um and don't really capture the data that clearly, or at least not in a standardized way, and then you've got institutions that are specifically dedicated for people with accessibility needs and often just one kind of need, and of course they have dreams um and their own their own way of looking at it.

A

So it's finding that medium that allows the more standard kind of leisure center to improve. Realistically, I guess is the is the art of it.

C

Well, I mean we could we could include both if what we're really saying is that sometimes there's general contact points and sometimes there's specific ones.

C

um You know you if uh I don't know what type uh the accessibility support uh is there, but you might be able to just inherit it from something that has contact point available anyway. You know so that it would be very easy to add that later. If someone during implementation has a burning need, yeah on a specific level.

A

Yeah, I think that I think that makes sense, um but keep things as simple as possible for now.

A

D

Yeah, that's right.

A

A

So um modeling, okay, so this is one I'd. Imagine that you've been over with lee in the in the deep past. At some point, this must have raised its head. So there's a distinction to be observed between accessibility, information which is really about the event um you know. So, if you've got um say specific, I don't know um emotional or physical support for some particular class, but then it's also in a building that is wheelchair accessible.

A

ah What do you do with that? um Do you just put everything into do you treat the accessibility as a feature of the event? Generally speaking, um do you put the stuff that relates to the location in the location, object um and the stuff that relates to the event on the event, object or or what um I feel like for parsing simplicity, you kind of want everything to be in one place, but then that does a certain violence as opposed to the reality of the situation.

C

C

Well, yeah, I guess they're saying different things right um so that, what's on the event and what's on the place, sorry is that maybe I missed what you would.

A

So most of the most of the accessibility- that's out there, accessibility, information, that's out there right now is about um places it's about locations, and it's it's saying you know: we've got um step. Free access, we've got uh disability, disabled parking. That kind of thing. um Then there is a small amount of it which is really about. If you come to this class, there will be uh limited light stimulation or limited noise stimulation. That kind of thing, which is only about that, which will only be the case for that particular hour, right.

D

A

Now both of those can be fit into this accessibility support array right, you could have gym quiet time for the event and you could also say step free access or whatever, um and all of this is living on the event directly, so to speak.

A

um On the other hand, a case could be made that the accessibility support is really in the latter case about step. Free access say, is really about the venue itself, um and maybe what you want to do is just have a link back to the venue for that kind of thing, because it's going to be repeated, you know, for everything that happens in that venue that step free access is going to be there. um So how do people.

C

Retrieve yeah, I think the reason that it wasn't it's not an event. It's sorry, the reason it's not in um the reason it's not in place, I think, is because the type of accessibility that places have, which are things like ramps, you know, like physical physical attributes, um had a different model to the type of accessibility notes that you might add to an event, um and I think we only focused on one of those two. But given that we're revisiting this properly now, it would seem to make sense to do both because they are different.

C

I mean whether you, however you're modeling, that ramp it needs to live in the place right because it is an attribute of the place and, however you're modeling, the um you know the the particular session that um is suitable for wheelchairs, for example, wheelchair basketball session. That probably needs to be in the session.

A

Yeah, I guess the question is thinking about it from the point of view of like an end user or or an intermediary like parasport, I mean, I guess what you want. Is you want to do a search on everywhere. That's got stuff free access, so you've got a you've, got a wheelchair-bound user who's like okay. You know what can I? What can I use? Yes,.

A

Then yeah, I suppose it's different use cases isn't it. um I, I think.

C

A

Be looking for different things so.

C

Yeah, I think, yeah exactly if you're looking for, but but then this leads on to a slightly separate question. So in the um in the mcr project. At the moment, we've got um things like pool hoists, which are obviously an attribute of the swimming pool um and the way that they're modeled using the spec, which conforms to the 2.0 spec, is by extending the. um uh What is the name of that thing?

C

uh Oh amenity, a yes amenity feature exactly that. So we've we've got additional amenity features defined, which are like the pool hoist um because because this spec allows you to extend the minity feature to add custom, custom ones and that's super useful because they want to do kind of filtering by these things. um And that's that's the use case around places is more filtering wise.

C

What's going on, so I kind of wonder whether well I don't I don't know, uh but I wonder whether there's uh because obviously I haven't I'm not, as I said at the beginning, I'm not the expert on this probably need to make sure that we've got parasport in this conversation, but for sure in like use cases in terms of use cases but um uh yeah. I think I think, because they're different use cases it may be worth thinking about that from a modeling perspective as well like. Is it the same model?

C

What services both you know, the one we've got right now isn't very friendly for searching across and indexing, because it's more kind of free, text-y.

B

C

So you know: do we want to have a recommendation around use of immunity features, for example, four places which covers I mean covers quite a lot. You can put ramps in there.

C

You could put a lot of things in there. um We just haven't formalized it, but I don't know it all comes back to these cases.

A

Yeah, I think I think, the the only difficulty with amenity feature, which could also be seen as an advantage, but I think the difficulty is talking to people in the disability sector there's some very, very fine-drained distinctions between say, different kinds of changing rooms and different kinds of toilet facilities.

A

So if you did do a amenity feature that way, I think you'd want a very fine-grained kind of controlled vocabulary to describe those things which shouldn't be hard to create in principle um that you know, there's there's some finite number. I mean it's more than most people would imagine, but you know it's it's under 10 say for each of those um and.

C

Well, look, I guess, is the question a use case. One does does that? Does the user want to search by these things and if they do, it needs to be a controlled vocabulary somewhere, because that's how they can unless it's a keyword search, but that's probably not going to you- know, allow them to display the information and the icons on whatever it is they want to display?

C

So I guess, if they do, then yeah where's the best place to put that.

A

Yeah, I think it's tricky too, because it does get it does get kind of fine drain. Sometimes so, like pool hoists, have got different, you know weight recommendations and that kind of thing.

C

Right but I mean, if you're, but if you're a user just looking for a place that can service you.

A

C

A search for any pool hoist is presumably better than no search.

A

Yeah yeah and again I guess that's the point of the contact point. I guess is if you once you've narrowed it down, um you can get that information by other means.

C

Yeah yeah I mean it would it would be really good if we do have another call on this topic. Just I know parasport specifically very interested in this stuff. You know having having someone from them on this, because I know it's quite technical about schemers, but it's very difficult to always to talk about.

B

Schemes without talking.

C

About use cases you quickly drift back to what are we actually trying to do here?.

A

Okay, so then we we'd actually be looking at using amenity feature for places and then more dynamic kinds of uh support would be going into into the event. Then.

C

Well, you could, I mean.

A

C

I guess you could do both for the accessibility stuff. I mean if it's helpful again in mcr, they've got a place. uh Sorry, a page for a place and they've also got a page for an event. There's a separate pages, so you're looking at the place, you're looking at all the things that are in the place, you've got the description and the image all the details, the video in some cases about that space, which is like a leisure center or whatever, and then that's where the pool voiced information sits.

C

You know- and this has got these these this place- has you know something called gin, blah blah blah and uh it has poi hoist so so yeah I mean you can imagine accessibility, information sitting there as well as you could on the event page.

B

A

um Okay, as you say, use cases um yeah. We have talked to powersport about higher level issues but yeah, I suppose getting into the nitty-gritty yeah. It's more helpful to focus the mind on on this particular problem: yeah, okay,.

C

Yeah and like I, but I think that they'd be well up for engaging in this level of discussion. um We've had them on this call before um and we've had other we've had the last access political. I think we had uh accessibility, alliance, power, support activity, yeah activity alliance, yeah exactly and then and a couple other organizations someone from sporting, but maybe um so uh yeah. I think um I think parasport were there, but anyway, yeah they're definitely they've been in this forum and I'm definitely able to contribute in this forum. For sure.

C

So I mean yeah definitely worth um because we don't have to have we can we can gauge, we can make the technical conversation as technical as it needs to be. I mean sometimes the way those conversations have worked um is that we've we've kind of had we've bounced between the use cases and the tech in the same call, so we kind of do a little bit of use case and then okay, but this could look like this in the schema. Oh, but does this then work?

C

If this happens, you know, and we can kind of cross check the scenarios with them as we go um and get something that's kind of got. I guess broadband, I suppose I'm a bit uh yeah kind of thinking. If we make any decisions off the back of this call, it sounds like maybe, if they've, if they've narrowed the use cases, then maybe that's something.

C

We need to make sure that they're on board with and maybe the best way of doing that is, is you know, bringing them into the forum rather than kind of checking back with them and coming back and things yeah.

A

No, that makes that make sense, um uh okay, so uh the next. The next point was I've: just not done an action to talk to them about that. um So this is about data providence.

A

um So the best sort of mine of accessibility, information that I've seen in the sector is actually with active places um and but the data gathering operation there is actually pretty immense that they do.

A

You know check on all of these things and I gather they probably have to be pretty persistent a lot of the time to make sure that they do get information um yeah. It's huge yeah.

A

Should that be reflected in the data about when the last time this information was updated and who, who did that updating? Basically.

C

Yeah that does sound like a good idea, because, yes, whereas all availability information is obviously live, as the system shows it and you'd expect the description to be similar uh accessibility could easily be. You know the survey was done two years ago.

C

I yeah, I don't know if I'm trying to think there's any other aspects of the data that really that kind of um latency applies to, but I guess not, because most things are very current, or at least most things are able to be updated by anyone in the marketing department who's trying to keep the data current, whereas this particular information might be a bit more um yeah yeah yeah, there's already a field in the booking spec that we use for the terms and conditions to uh see when they're updated, which I imagine is the same field from schema that you're looking at so.

A

Okay, maybe just a line there. um I guess: what's the guidance on that, I mean to really be robust, it would have to be required and in principle, there's. No. That should be one of the easiest pieces of data to supply.

C

uh um When it's.

A

Yeah the providence information um I mean, I worry, that data data entry people are going to see this as the least important and least interesting thing to enter it's going to be an afterthought for them, but in fact it's well. It makes the rest of it.

C

You don't have to go out and collect it right. That's true! I I was thinking it was a system, level property, but yeah. I see what you're saying could be entered manually as well, um because if you've got a system, that's capturing this data, then obviously the last time that field was updated.

A

Yeah, but I think, um if you imagine, a sort of active places, style workflow right where, where there is a kind of manual check, yes or indeed, social prescribing, I think that kind of manual check is going to be very, very common as well.

C

Yeah, fair enough also the yeah well, the property I was looking at is called date modified um from the from schema, so yeah I mean without again knowing much more about the domain. um It sounds like a useful property to include sure um I guess they don't need to include it if they don't have accurate data.

C

The difficulty.

B

C

Fields: yeah, we don't. We don't want a big situation where we force people to supply false information to pass the validator. I mean that's been that's something. We've been fighting since the beginning. Okay,.

C

We've definitely had people put dummy, and example, values in you know their data that doesn't just to pass the validator, which is completely not a point um so but then I mean, I think this is where your you know. The profiles that are being developed come in potentially right. So if you've got some accessibility profile, then maybe this is a score on that.

C

um So it's not required, but profiles is a bit of a softer approach to that. Rather.

A

Than that in mandating yeah.

C

Yeah, because I think also what we seem to have learned with required fields is it's. The required fields are more kind of system level. Things like what is required to make this make sense, um because if you, if you start straying outside of what is required from a system perspective like you, need the activity list, property for example, that has to be there because from a system perspective, you can't show it on the search results, if it's not there, so that has to be there.

C

But if you start mandating fields that you know uh are not that like image, for example, then you can't you can't really because it's basically the difference between data validity and data quality and the required fields should probably be around the validity of the thing I mean. Is this piece of data useful enough to be used anywhere? And if it's, if it's bad quality, that's almost separate again, I guess. Maybe the profiles cover that.

A

Yeah- and I think that I think that's useful- that's that is indeed the whole point of the profiles. It's suitable for a particular use case rather than you know, machine actionable.

D

um Right so yeah, okay, yeah! That's a that's a good point.

A

um And then, finally modularity, um so this is a pretty. This arose out of a discussion with uh somebody working for a comaball, which is an organization who worked with airbnb for getting accessibility, information for airbnb properties, and he said in his view that actually all sectors had roughly the same accessibility problems um and that it was sort of slightly artificial to segment out one particular sector. um So I suppose that raises the question.

A

I'm kind of doing this back to front here, but um should this be something that gets taken to schema.org as a kind of general um policy? They don't have anything right now covering this domain.

C

ah Yeah, I'm just having a look accessibility summary, which seems to be uh around a creative work.

A

Yeah, what I've seen in schema.org, it's mostly about the the electronic representation, yes other than the institution that is being described.

C

Yeah yeah yeah yeah, well, yeah. I mean, I think, if you ping the mailing list, you'd get a really yeah. You get them interested in this, um if indeed, uh yeah and- and I think, if maybe the thing to do with that is- um uh propose something uh like a little a little concrete um and and then I mean maybe, and just this is just a suggestion that they seem to the way the schema philosophy seems to be draw on the best from lots of different different areas and then bring it all together.

C

So they don't, they don't specialize anything themselves they're about what's the best in so I guess, if there's no standard for this at all at the moment that we can like lean on and say we're drawing from this existing thing, um then maybe the best we can do is you know, get get all the parties we have together, get them to agree on something that looks pretty credible and put that into a github issue, or you know, maybe maybe a markdown file in the repo or something and then post that into their mailing list and say look.

C

This is a complete x. We were interested in in whether would you be interested in bringing this kind of work into schema.org is there? Is there benefit in that? um Because the other thing is that obviously schemas developing uh stuff that describes real things, but they're also now describing events and um things that aren't sorry describing things that aren't digital anymore.

A

um I guess the the difficulty from a sort of program perspective. um I guess, is that this is going to be a long process. I can imagine this will go through iterations and a lot of changes before you know it would ever become part of schema.org.

C

Well, I think I think yeah and but I think that's why you know us prioritizing getting our duck scenario first and presenting up the finished product to them, because they they never. If you kind of watch the mailing list discussions, they never engage. People in. Oh, have you thought about this because of your date. You know your domain blah blah right, they're, not saying um you know, I think they should be pool hoists or not like.

C

They have no idea they're just talking about it from a kind of modeling perspective, and how does it fit in with other areas that they've already modelled? And you know, do you want to prefix that property with something it doesn't clash with something else or whatever? So I mean sometimes I get into that detail but like it doesn't seem, especially this with this topic that um I feel like we have to solve the problem.

C

First almost and then present something credible that we've obviously all agreed on, which means we probably would put that stuff in beta right ourselves and adopt it in parallel and start to push it um and and see. You know if we can get some adoption on on the properties as they are um and then and then you know see if we can then do that in parallel, and we can move the properties out of beta into schema, as we have with time zone stuff.

C

um You know as as and when and that can be that could take years, but um but at least but that's it, but it's a good process to engage in and if we've already done the hard work and we're proving it every day that we're waiting for them. That's probably the thing: isn't it rather than yeah. If we can, if we have a situation where we're blocked on schema, we're, probably never gonna, it doesn't work that way. Does it schema responds to demand yeah? So we can't, as we've seen with the api stuff.

A

Yeah, okay, so I mean, I think, that's not a not an immediate priority but yeah once once road tested and tires kicked and so on, um yeah, um okay, so having having dealt with the big chunky, one first, um starting at the top. So right now this is part of the opportunities back. This is really yeah, just a bunch of I guess it would be be hip properties. um Should it actually be its own kind of specification, um which I guess is not entirely independent of the schema.org question.

A

But um you know: should this be accessibility, 0.1 or something right now.

C

And yeah, I don't know we obviously got a history of conversations about spec proliferation. The root standard turned out to be its own thing, because it was absolutely massive for all the good reasons, the other great work that was done on that.

C

um Obviously this is this does have a lot of overlap, but a lot of the things that already in the existing modeling spec um we've got our ducks in a row around how to deal with multiple versions of specs now, because all the tooling just has its own version, so we can deal with routes, one booking one, whatever two um and then as long as yeah and and the tools just support the latest so um until that breaks which it hasn't.

C

Yet so I mean it's, not it's not going to be an issue logistically having it in a separate document. um I don't know if it does, it does get a bit like there's lots of documents to look at then, if you're trying to implement this um and you're looking for the kind of source of truth, but I guess- but I guess what I was saying at the beginning is to uh well sorry.

C

I was saying just just now is to kind of getting it into a markdown form or into a um you know something that's more kind of rough. If you've seen uh facility types facility, types.

A

No, I mean it's ringing a bell, but I'm not too sure what you're referring to.

C

uh Yeah so open active. I o facility types, it's very um basic compared to this, um but it's basically a um basically a repository that holds a controlled vocabulary and a beta property which is presently adopted by like a handful of the publishers, well actually exactly by gladstone and the classical system and then all of their customers um but yeah, and this had some work that went into it.

C

There's a github issue that relates to it you can see uh which is in the in which we transferred into the repository from the main repository uh from from the modeling spec repository.

C

So um so it kind of is its own repo for the purposes of one particular more more detailed thing uh which felt more than the modeling spec, but not quite enough for a full-blown spec.

C

So I mean you know: one one route is to start with something like this, which is, I guess, a bit bit briefer um and then then use this to surface, uh to get feedback and- and if we put it in beta, uh you know get get better adoption. I think the problem we've got is, I don't think because of the nature of this, I'm not sure we could put it straight into the main namespace yeah yeah, because it probably needs. Probably it's one of those things.

C

That's going to come out a bit in the wash as we go through no.

B

I think that's right.

C

Yeah so so pro I mean so something like this, which would which is basically a proposal which you can imagine that example, there being slightly bigger and covering what you had on the previous slide, um and um I don't know if you've seen that you can. If you go to open active, I o slash, ns, hyphen, beta or even slash test type and interface.

C

um These are all there's a we've got a tool that you can use to generate the documentation with the classes, the properties, everything yeah and the stuff all comes from. The json ld document.

A

Yeah yeah I've seen that.

C

Yeah so so I mean that might be, I mean it comes with a json ld document.

C

uh You could you know you, could you could put it in beta, you put it in its own name, space um yeah, I'm just thinking of different ways of doing it or you just have one. If you, you could just have a markdown document and just use beta, because there's not that many properties um and then just use the markdown document to describe those properties and give examples of of their use.

A

Yeah so yeah, it's almost more like a yeah, it's lots of beta properties and extensive guidance. I guess.

C

Yeah and and like very clear signposting to feedback mechanisms like yeah, like click here and raise an issue, if you don't like this or this or this sort of.

C

And then, hopefully as well, that will mean- because I imagine, with these type of things, that maybe the implementation of this will take a few months for people to finally engage with it and what we've seen happen. Obviously, with most of these things, is that as soon as the people that are going to do the work actually engaging it properly, which happens you know with a bit of a lag. Suddenly you get all this like feedback all over the place. Oh well, we thought about this. This is going to work in our interface yeah.

C

The whole thing gets, you know completely changed, so imagine that yeah.

A

That was one thing that came out really, interestingly, in the um workshop this morning regarding social prescribing that one question that I had not been anticipating was: how does this relate to snomed the the medical controlled vocabulary, and I was like wow, it could wow and to a certain extent, if you look at some higher level social prescribing sites that don't ensure that level of granularity, you can see that there is kind of a bridge between physical activity and this very granular. You know very formal medical taxonomy, um but yeah it's a it's.

A

uh You know it's like a radical new area of work that opened up that I hadn't anticipated. So yeah flexibility is going to be key once um once engagement is higher. You know.

C

Yeah- and I know that parasports specifically have got a project right where they're going to be using and publishing this data.

C

So I guess they'll be high on the list of people that might yeah.

B

A

I think the feed question so one yeah one question I noted down. There was just you know: where does this live um and but I guess that's actually answered a bit by the location event. Kind of dichotomy.

C

Yeah, this does seem like it attaches to existing stuff. Doesn't it rather than being its own world of thing? I guess a bit like a bit different to roots with it, which is like an entire sphere of its own, which is almost completely unrelated. This is very much uh descriptive properties about the things.

A

Okay, I think I think that that one it's nice to end on one of the simpler questions. I think that was where I was kind of leaning um but uh yeah. Okay, um thank you nick. That was extremely useful. I think you're right that. Obviously we do have to broaden the conversation out to um other organizations with more sort of domain and more concrete use cases, but I think, as uh general orientation for the spec. That was really helpful.

C

um Oh no worries look forward to seeing as this progresses. This has been one of the things that open active has been trying to do since the beginning, so really great to see that the progress being made. It's so encouraging.

A

Yeah and I think it's I think it's an issue- that's gaining more traction generally, so I think I think engagement is getting easier as well.

D

um It's marrying up the two sides: um yeah yeah yeah yeah, sure absolutely great. Okay, thanks very much nick.

B

C

I'm sure okay speak soon, thanks so much.