1. Annotating the Web with W3C Open Annotations
Robert Sanderson
rsanderson@lanl.gov
azaroth42@gmail.com
Los Alamos National Laboratory
@azaroth42
(W3C Open Annotation Co-Chair)
http://www.openannotation.org/
http://www.w3c.org/community/
openannotation
This research was funded, in part, by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Social Reading Experience of Sharing Bookmarks and Annotations 1
September 12th 2012, NISO Webinar

2. Open Annotation
• Communities
• Annotation, E-Books and the Web
• Core Open Annotation Model
• Extended Model: Specific Resources
• The Road Ahead
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September 12th 2012, NISO Webinar

3. Open Annotation and the W3C
• Open Annotation Collaboration (focus: humanities, web)
• LANL, UIUC, Queensland, MITH, plus others
• Annotation Ontology (focus: science)
• Harvard, Manchester, plus others
• Models merged November 2011-March 2012
• Basis of W3C Open Annotation Community Group
• Next f2f meeting: September 18-19, Chicago
• http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation
• Open to all
• Please join in the discussion!
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September 12th 2012, NISO Webinar

4. Social, Digital Annotation
• NISO Working Group on Digital Annotation
• Apple, Adobe, IDPF, EBSCO, Sony, hypothes.is, …
• 3 Meetings (New York, San Franciso, Frankfurt)
• Introduced and reinforced several requirements:
• Need to be able to specify how to render the annotation
• Issues with text quoting and book reconstruction
• Challenges with text segments:
• Robustness in the face of change
• Precision of the selection
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September 12th 2012, NISO Webinar

5. Further Community
• International Image Interoperability Framework
• Stanford, Oxford, Cornell, BL, BNF, KB,
Natl. Library of Norway, UK Natl. Archives, ArtStor, …
• Digital Medieval Manuscript Interoperability Forum
• As IIIF, plus Drew, St Louis, Ghent, Meertens Institute, …
• Close Ties to:
• W3C Provenance WG
• schema.org
• NLP Interchange Format group
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September 12th 2012, NISO Webinar

6. E-Books and the Web
• Web formats are E-Book formats
• Epub is just HTML5
• Apps/Sites and E-Books are moving closer together
• E-Books are not just Text!
• Video or audio comments
• … about embedded images, 3-d models
• Multiple targets for a single annotation
• Compare/Contrast, grouping, …
• Fine grained region of interest is crucial
• Particular word in text, letter depicted in image …
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September 12th 2012, NISO Webinar

7. Basic Model
An RDF
Document
The What The
Comment Comment is
About
http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/
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8. Basic Model
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9. Annotation Types
Class Description
Bookmark Marker at (a point in) a resource
Change Request for modification
Classification Assignment of a class
Comment Commentary or Review
Description Description of, rather than about target
Highlight Highlighted (section of a) resource
Link Relationship of unspecified semantics
Moderation Assignment of value or quality
Question Question about target
Reference Citation or reference pointer for target
Reply Response to previous statement
Tag A tag on target resource, often textual
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September 12th 2012, NISO Webinar

10. Annotation Types
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11. Multiple Targets
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12. Further Specification of Resources
Specific Body and Specific Target resources identify the region of
interest, and/or the state of the resource.
Need to be able to describe the state of the resource, the segment
of interest, and potentially styling hints for how to render it.
We introduce two Specifiers:
Selector Describes how to select segment
State Describes how to retrieve representation
(Where did Style go? It’s moving to the Annotation in next draft)
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13. Specific Target
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14. Offset Text Selector
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15. Quotation Text Selector
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16. Fragment Selector
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17. Further Features
• Embedding resources
• Embedding body, specifiers, styles for transport
• Semantic and Data Annotations
• Semantic tags, annotating data, data as commentary
• Provenance of Annotation
• Versioning
• Equivalence
• Archiving
• Annotator / Generator distinction
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September 12th 2012, NISO Webinar

18. The Road Ahead
• September face to face
• Resolve open questions
• October-December
• Revised Draft
• 2013
• Final Draft
• Look at moving to W3C Working Group structure
• Towards standards track / recommendation status
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September 12th 2012, NISO Webinar

19. Thank You
Robert Sanderson
rsanderson@lanl.gov
azaroth42@gmail.com
@azaroth42
Web:
http://www.openannotation.org/
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/
http://www.shared-canvas.org/
Slides:
http://www.slideshare.net/azaroth42/
…/
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September 12th 2012, NISO Webinar