- From: Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 3 Nov 2015 10:58:43 -0500
- To: Randall Leeds <randall@bleeds.info>, Robert Sanderson <azaroth42@gmail.com>
- Cc: Web Annotation <public-annotation@w3.org>
Hi, Randall– I do agree with you that RDF (and probably other formats, with various tweaks) provide a way to describe an annotation using generic capabilities, as you suggest. There's nothing new about annotations, about RDF, or about describing links on the Web. Yet, in the 25 years since the Web was created, despite there being numerous annotation projects or annotation capabilities in various formats, there has not emerged a popular, widely-agreed way to characterize and exchange annotations. Annotations have not yet reached critical mass as a method of exchanging targeted comments in all this time, despite there being significant benefits from them over similar structures (like traditional comments, or referential posts). The working hypothesis (no pun intended) of this group is that we can help annotations reach this critical mass by breaking the problem space down into several functional components that work independently or together to provide a framework for annotations. These components include: an interchange model with various serializations; protocols for publishing, reading, searching, exchanging, and federating annotations; one or more robust anchoring mechanisms; and client-side (DOM) APIs and events. The interchange format (e.g. the Data Model) is an important part of that, because it distinguishes annotations as a distinct Kind of Thing, a specific data abstraction with specific functionality (including targets and bodies) that lends itself to particular modes of presentation (including an expectation of contextual display with the target content). We could define it simply as a generic RDF graph, but that doesn't serve the goal of helping people think of annotations as a specific approach to a common problem (which is the decontextualization and centralization of user-generated content, among other things). Further, if all we did was to define an RDF graph, that is unlikely to capture the interest or needs of the JavaScript-centric community, which would be a pretty large omission. As an intellectual exercise, and an attempt to define the very minimum we need to define an annotation, this thread is interesting, but I personally think we need more than that if we're going to clearly communicate our vision for how annotations can improve the Web. Regards– –Doug On 10/27/15 7:56 PM, Randall Leeds wrote: > On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 4:41 PM Robert Sanderson wrote: > > And finally ... we already have rdf:Statement (and the > recommendations against its use) and named graphs. If an Annotation > were restricted to just a single statement, I'm not sure that we > would need a new specification :) > > > Thanks for making my point for me. > > SpecificResource and the selector vocabulary is great and I don't see > anything that exists quite like that. > > But we have mechanisms to distribute statements with attribution. I > don't understand what the model adds to that other than, it seems, a way > to obfuscate the semantics and avoid actually creating triples that > relate the body and target. > > In a sense, it seems to me like the purpose of much of the model is to > escape from having to model that which we want to model.
Received on Tuesday, 3 November 2015 15:58:49 UTC