Re: Spec Annotation Experiment Invitation

Thanks Doug!

As this crosses over multiple working groups, I think that a separate forum
for discussing requirements on the UI (for example) or other aspects that
do not fall under the scope of this WG is very appropriate.

On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 11:02 AM, Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org> wrote:

> 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).
>

I completely agree with this call.  As per other threads, we make progress
as a community by coming to consensus and volunteering effort to make that
consensus real.  Thanks to hypothes.is for their enthusiasm, and we would
welcome further expressions of interest.  I'll reply separately, not as
chair, with an offer from Stanford.


> 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.
>

This has my complete endorsement! :) By dogfooding this in a major way, we
demonstrate to the W3C and the web at large that we are fundamentally
engaged and making significant progress.  Other efforts have floundered by
not taking this seriously, and we must learn from those mistakes.



> 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.
>

And just to add that this should not be seen as putting the cart before the
horse in terms of protocol.  This experiment is itself a use case that we
can all help with building out to learn about requirements and best
practices.  It does not in any way require the WG to specify any or all of
the features undertaken, nor in the way that the experiment implements
them.  On the other hand, if it is useful and able to be standardized, we
should consider them very carefully.

Many thanks,

Rob

-- 
Rob Sanderson
Technology Collaboration Facilitator
Digital Library Systems and Services
Stanford, CA 94305