Harvesting API requires assignment of resource type to record

[edwardanderson]

I'm following the recommendations for implementing Harvesting by exposing record change events as a IIIF Change Discovery endpoint for Activity Streams records.

The extension requires/recommends the provision of a Linked Art resource type to qualify the object of the data change event:

{
  "type": "Update",
  "object": {
    "id": "https://example.org/api/object/1",
    "type": "HumanMadeObject"
  }
}

... only I think this conflates the type of the thing being updated, the record (api/object/1), with the thing that the record is about, which in this example is a HumanMadeObject (presumably http://example.org/object/1 or wherever api/object/1 redirects to). I'm reluctant to point the data change event to the described resource directly because it hasn't changed, just the data about it has.

I think I have two choices:

• point the data change event at the record and apply a Linked Art type to it anyway
• point the data change event at the described resource (which hasn't changed)

Or some other way?

Edit: just don't provide a type for the object at all?

[azaroth42]

It does conflate record with the thing the record describes, for sure. I think that's an acceptable trade-off, as we don't want to have different URIs for the record and the thing, otherwise we need to jump through annoying hoops to get from one to the other.

It also means that if you only want to aggregate records that describe a certain class, you can trivially filter through the stream for only HMOs or only Persons rather than fetching everything and then throwing away the ones you didn't need to retrieve in the first place.

[aisaac]

Call 10-06-2026: it would be nice to have a clearer idea of what could work to use IIIF Change API while enabling the separation between record and object