RFC/PROPOSAL: add object_id_type to event.schema

[AnkitSiva]

What/Why

What are you proposing?

We propose that the object field in the event schema contain a an object_id_type so that consumers of UBI data can know what the object_id refers to. The object_id itself should not be counted on having that information and the object_id_field only discusses what field in a DB index would contain that value.

What users have asked for this feature?

We have spoken to data analysts who work on analyzing user behavior.

What problems are you trying to solve?

We are trying to solve the problem of helping the analysts parse out interactions related to products/videos/posts/users on the same app. With only an object_id, we are requiring the front-end developer to know how to package that object_id so that an analyst can analyze the same data.

Are there any security considerations?

No additional security impact.

Are there any breaking changes to the API

No

What is the user experience going to be?

Customer can configure the object_id_type to denote what the type of searched item is.

Are there breaking changes to the User Experience?

No

Why should it be built? Any reason not to?

This will allow for the analyst to more easily understand things like user pattern to product purchase, build personalization on products and click-through-rate for ads.

What will it take to execute?

1. Merging this pull request
2. Documentation and samples updates.

Any remaining open questions?

No.

[smacrakis]

What exactly do you mean by "type"? Is this the information needed for interpreting the object_id, e.g., "book ISBN", "North American SKU", "article DOI"? Or is it the type of the object itself? e.g. book, vegetable, article? In the first case, I'd think you'd want to include the type in the ID itself as a URI/URN, e.g., urn:isbn:234234234 (RFC 3986) if the application needs it. If it's about the type of the object itself, that seems like an OK optional field.

[miike]

This is definitely a useful field to have. I agree with @smacrakis above that ideally it would go into a URI (but then you would likely need to split it downstream) but a lot of folks don't have this so I think having a string field to disambiguate the object_id makes sense.

[dtaivpp]

This seems reasonable. I think the hard part about this is it's not a very objective field. I like the samples in the enum field though. Doing something like that can help this not just turn into a dumping ground for random data types.

[epugh]

I suspect in the future that we do is have extensions to the ubi spec that are specific to use case. The object_id_field almost may be too specific of an attribute, yet we need it today! Based on feedback from @smacrakis @dtaivpp I am going to merge this as a way of getting real world usage.