Re: Annotations and the Graph

Thanks, Tim. This is helpful.

I'll respond a little bit inline.

On Wed, Oct 28, 2015 at 9:52 AM Timothy Cole <t-cole3@illinois.edu> wrote:

> Regarding utility of annotations without bodies
>
...

> It was sufficient to simply call attention to the passage – i.e., make a
> SpecificResource – and then move on.
>
Yes. When I suggest that bodiless annotations might not be a necessary
thing, this is exactly what I'm referring to.

What's a use case that can be handled by a bodiless annotation that can't
be handled by simply creating and consuming the SpecificResource directly?
What purpose does the Annotation node serve in these cases?


> And we have to be able to provide provenance and context for the creation
> of a SpecificResource.
>
If the user is minting a SpecificResource -- which makes a lot of sense,
because you can mint any number of them that point to the same content --
then the provenance can be attached to that directly. There's no need for a
separate Annotation node.


> I also anticipate that a majority of bodied annotations will not have
> motivations or roles – again this is partly due to users not being willing
> to stop and describe their motivation or the role of their bodies / targets
> – but that some will have one or the other and some will have both.
>
>
That just means the relation between the body and the target is very
generic one. There certainly is a relation, though, since the user is
creating an annotation that connects them.

What I'm proposing is mostly that the relation should be easily inferred,
thereby creating an actual statement link between the body (or bodies) and
target (or targets).

It simply doesn't make sense to me that annotation cannot be interpreted as
creating a link of any kind between the resources involved.

>  So, I would need to see more concrete examples of how RDF reification
> could be used in lieu of the separate oa:Annotation class to support our
> full range of use cases and what reification graphs might look liked
> serialized in json-ld before I could consider endorsing the idea.
>
I can generate more examples if you really think that'd be helpful.

I just wanted to gauge interest and find out if I was fundamentally
misunderstanding something before I sunk a bunch of time into it.

None of these responses yet convince me I am way off the mark, though.
Cutting through the specifics of whether a sub-class is appropriate, I
don't see any argument against an annotation implying a predicate relation
between the body and target.

Again, the reason I think this is important is that I want annotations to
describe new graph edges. We talk about use cases for annotations that
represent edits to content. We don't talk about annotations that edit the
global graph. It seems to me that everything else is a degenerate case of
that if what's being dealt with is linked data in any sense.