Model/Protocol: Collections

All,

I think one area that would be profitable to focus on for Tuesday at TPAC
and in the coming weeks is Collections of Annotations.

In particular:

* We've had the use case for "lists" or "sets" of annotations to discuss
for a long time but never come back to it.  The IDPF EPUB work and the DPUB
use cases document both express the requirement, and we talked about it at
the April F2F as being useful in many situations.

* After taking LDP Paging out of the protocol mix, as it doesn't support
in-page ordering, we need a replacement, with the proposal being
ActivityStreams OrderedCollection.  This is for retrieving the set of
annotations that are created and managed by a service (an LDP Container).

* Search will need the same functionality for ordered pages, without the
REST components for creation and management.  It should use the same model
and structure as above.

* The use cases require some descriptive metadata about the collection of
annotations.  That information should be able to be internationalized,
which is complicated if there's also a desire to have the format of the
content be identified.  However we don't want to end up down the rabbit
hole of supporting every last piece of descriptive metadata that anyone
might dream up ... so what's the common core that we should specify?

* Currently all of the Collection information is in an ED for the
Protocol... but I think it should be in Model and then referred to from
Protocol with explanation as to how it aligns.  Thus there could be some
Collections that are static (perhaps you buy them like DVD extras), and
some that are online and also Containers that can be interacted with.  This
would also make it more coherent as to why there are a bunch of protocol
related entries in the Model's JSON-LD context appendix.

Related github issues are:

* https://github.com/w3c/web-annotation/issues/50
* https://github.com/w3c/web-annotation/issues/48

I'll try to have a written proposal to discuss next week :)

Rob

-- 
Rob Sanderson
Information Standards Advocate
Digital Library Systems and Services
Stanford, CA 94305