Re: Spec Annotation Experiment Invitation

There will be technical considerations that need to be addressed; right 
now, Annotator doesn't support the Web Annotation or Open Annotation 
data models, but that's going to be fixed within weeks. 
A slight correction.

The roadmap for Annotator 2.0 is here:

http://docs.annotatorjs.org/en/architecture-proposal/roadmap.html

Support fo an internal data model consistent with OA is on the order of “weeks” (rough time frames, which we are slightly delayed on now, are in the roadmap).  It includes a (beta-quality) storage component that speaks OA JSON-LD.

Hypothes.is, and our application is built on a fork of Annotator.  We’ll first get Annotator 2.0 deployed, and then we’ll work on getting off our fork of it, which will take longer, but which of course is a priority for us for many reasons.

D





On November 26, 2014 at 11:03:10 AM, Doug Schepers (schepers@w3.org) wrote:

Hi, folks–  

As you know, we've been working on integrating Annotator into the  
WebPlatform.org project, specifically to make it easier to annotate  
specifications. The Web Annotation WG is one of the first working groups  
to approve using this as a feedback mechanism (which seems appropriate).  

I'm convinced that in-band annotation will be a far superior feedback  
and discussion mechanism than W3C's traditional mailing list approach.  
But just how we execute on that, and what combination of software we  
use, is still an open question.  

So, this is an open invitation for any annotation projects or vendors to  
get involved in the experiment. This includes annotation authoring  
clients, reading clients, storage and search servers/repos, and any  
other annotation tools that may be out there (e.g. data visualizers,  
reasoning engines, or things we simply haven't thought of yet).  


As mentioned, our initial approach is to use the Annotator project,  
since it's open-source, has a large, active, and diverse contributor  
community, provides the core features that we need (an in-browser  
sidebar-based client for authoring and reading, and a searchable backend  
annotation repo), and because we've gotten integration support from  
Hypothesis. We are also open to working with any other projects or  
organizations.  

We feel there are enormous benefits to working with multiple annotation  
projects. It gives us the opportunity to try lots of different options,  
avoids lock-in to any single solution, road-tests our annotation  
specifications to get valuable experience, gives us multiple  
interoperable implementations for when we try to advance along the  
Recommendation track, and contributes to a thriving annotation ecosystem.  


There will be technical considerations that need to be addressed; right  
now, Annotator doesn't support the Web Annotation or Open Annotation  
data models, but that's going to be fixed within weeks. Once that  
happens, we should be able to easily share annotations between other  
servers and clients. I would like to use that time to prep other  
services to make sure that all the pieces will work together.  


So, if you'd like to work with us to use your annotation project as part  
of this spec annotation experiment, please join the dedicated Spec  
Annotation Community Group [1], where we will be coordinating. I've  
started jotting down some initial requirements and phases in the CG wiki  
[2], and I welcome suggestions for improving them.  


As Frederick noted, we plan to work closely between the Spec Annotation  
CG and other relevant groups, including the Web Annotation WG, the  
Social Web WG, the WebApps WG, the HTML WG, and any other groups that  
have deliverables that will bear on implementations (e.g. Robust  
Anchoring, Selection API, HTML editing APIs, ActivityStreams or other  
social APIs, and so on).  

We'll also be coordinating with working groups that want to use the  
annotation tool, including this WG, the Audio WG, and others.  


Happy Thanksgiving, for those of you celebrating that, and happy dinner  
plans for everyone else!  

[1] http://www.w3.org/community/spec-annotation/  
[2] https://www.w3.org/community/spec-annotation/wiki/  

Regards-  
-Doug