Re: Annotea and changed files

Hello Veith,

On Fri, Oct 25, 2002 at 11:43:06AM +0200, Veith Risak wrote:
>
> I tried Annotea with Amaya; it works fine (if there are not more than
> ca. 39 annotations to a single page).

Can you tell me which version of Amaya and which platform 
are you using? I've been unable to reproduce this bug. 

> As I understand, annotea uses XPointer for locationg the annotations 
> concerning the annotated document.

That's correct.

> These annotations are stored at a separate server (not with the 
> annotated document, to which no write possibility is needed.) That means 
> the annotation and addressing information are stored at the local or 
> Annotea server.

They are stored separately, either in a server or locally.

> This is fine, as long as the annotated document is not changed, deleted, ...
> If this occurs, the adress-information must be wrong (for example 
> annotations for a deleted document)
> There must be some sort of synchronization.
> I could imagine at loading a deleted document => error 404 (no 
> annotations). But at loading a changed document: Is there a check, if 
> the annotation-information on the server fits the loaded document?
> If not, the annotations could point to wrong parts of the text.

This is the problem of orphan annotations and robust XPointers.
Currently, the Amaya XPointer implementation is very basic. One could
always imagine new ways of using XPointer to reduce the risk of orphan
annotations. Some other people believe that the only way to do this is
to expand the context of what you annotated, e.g., including the
previous paragraphs. Knowing when a document has been modified is always
easy. Knowing how to reassing the annotations is not so easy.

We're expanding the annotation schema so that you can have other
contexts than just XPointer. This can be used to make more robust
annotations. We're not defining the other context ourselves, but just
making it possible to have people add them into an annotation.

> A second question:
> 
> If I use Annotea with Amaya locally on my PC, can I access the 
> annotations with mozilla too and vice versa?

I think that mozilla only supports remote annotations. We have yet to
specify how to exchange local annotations between applications. Once
this is done, you can store your annotations anywhere, even outside of
an annotation server and link your documents to them, e.g., using an
HTML LINK attribute, like we do today for linking external CSS.

I hope we find time to work on this. All contributions are welcome, of
course.

I hope this answered your questions.

Regards,

-jose

Received on Friday, 25 October 2002 06:52:24 UTC