Re: [web-annotation] Justify each Motivation with a behavior

-1

We discussed this kind of normative work with @tilgovi at length back 
in October. The primary problem that I can see is producing the 
requisite user warrant to adequately interpret each motivation in a 
consistent way.  Some of the motivations are so vague we have no way 
to determine if they are the same or different (e.g., What is the 
difference between commenting and replying? Why say 'commenting' 
instead of 'remarking'?).

This will also inevitably cause collisions when other communities 
extend with their own motivations.

I am sympathetic to your goal though. Good ontologies require that 
both the writers and the software agents make certain ontological 
commitments which then shape behavior. One of the problems with our 
work here (and work all across the W3C from what I can see) is that we
 avoid commitments like the plague. Which of course begs the questions
 of what we expect servers to do with annotations and how can be 
possibly build a useful API is the goalposts are obfuscated behind 
waving hands.

Nevertheless, developing normative behavior based on motivations isn't
 a good idea. However, we might reexamine an alternative approach that
 was suggested by Bob (and Phil) Morris (not related) specifically for
 the editing use case years ago. You won't like it though. It makes a 
complex model even more complex.

Bob's (and Phil Morris's) suggestion was an additional property on 
annotation called "expectation" that worked in conjunction with 
motivation by specifying what kind of behavior the user expected to be
 taken. (E.g., execute my edit.) We could "normalize" the behavior of 
motivations by using this one-two combination of motivation and 
expectation (which roughly interprets to 'by A I mean do B'). This is 
a really ugly solution (and was voted down almost instantly by the 
community group) but it does sidestep the user warrant problem for 
interpreting motivations.

Regards,

Jacob



_____________________________________________________
Jacob Jett
Research Assistant
Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship
The Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
501 E. Daniel Street, MC-493, Champaign, IL 61820-6211 USA
(217) 244-2164
jjett2@illinois.edu


-- 
GitHub Notification of comment by jjett
Please view or discuss this issue at 
https://github.com/w3c/web-annotation/issues/113#issuecomment-158487144
 using your GitHub account

Received on Friday, 20 November 2015 18:43:20 UTC