[model] Clarifying annotation architecture

(not as chair)

I think Doug brought up some important concerns on the call today about the visibility and impact of semantic web constraints on the annotation architecture, in particular the model.

Here are some statements that I think we agree are true:

1. Our goal is wide adoption of Web Annotations by end users and implementers.

2. Many of these users and implementers neither know nor care about the semantic web; however we see value in having an underlying semantic web basis, hidden from those who don't care. We expect this will offer power and flexibility enabling more use cases in the future.

Our goal is to build on a linked data/semantic web technology foundation while making it invisible to implementers or users that don't know or care.

3. We have use cases such as associating multiple 'tasks' in a single annotation: e.g comment on target and also provide replacement action on same target.

4. We need a clean and straight-forward model to support these use cases.

Here is the issue that appears to have come up:

Without understanding linked data, it seems that we could model the related tasks as a single annotation with different roles on each part (per use case task).

From a linked data perspective, the issue appears to be that all triples (assertions) are global scope leading to complexities that make no sense to those unaware of the semantic web relationship to annotations.

We appear in the discussion to be creating complicated approaches to enable global triples while solving the annotation need.

I am not a semantic web expert, but wouldn't treating each annotation as a separate graph (in the case where there are multiple 'tasks') solve the global triple scope problem, without requiring any more than a note to semantic web implementers?

Perhaps someone can elaborate with a clear and short summary of the problem we need to solve and the potential solutions to date.  Corrections on what I noted above are also welcome.

Thanks

regards, Frederick

Frederick Hirsch

www.fjhirsch.com
@fjhirsch

Received on Wednesday, 22 July 2015 16:29:12 UTC