Re: Annotations and the Graph

Jacob,

Thank you for your patience. Responses inline.

On Wed, Oct 28, 2015 at 2:19 PM Jacob Jett <jjett2@illinois.edu> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 28, 2015 at 1:20 PM, Randall Leeds <randall@bleeds.info>
> wrote:
>
>
>> No such statement implied by the annotation can actually be made because
>> the model doesn't specify that there is *any* relationship between the body
>> and the target. That seems absurd considering that the purpose of
>> annotation is so often to relate the them.
>>
>
> See Section 1 (the introduction) of the model. It's all right there in the
> definition. There is even a helpful picture.
>

 One problem you have is that Specific Resources do not adequately capture
> the role that the CSS plays in highlighting annotations; however, to me
> that's an argument that CSS can be a body. I am sympathetic that
> annotations should have bodies; however, you need to rethink how your
> reasoner would work. As defined in the model, it is perfectly acceptable to
> infer body relatedTo target. You can go a step further by interpreting the
> motivations as sub-classes of the relatedTo property but that is an
> idiosyncratic interpretation and your reasoner's output would be
> idiosyncratic. IMO, its outside of the scope of our charter to do any
> normative work along these lines.
>

It is exactly this interpretation of motivations that I would like to
specify so that the interpretation is not idiosyncratic but normative.

I believe that reifying that interpretation results in a dataset that is
eminently more consistent with how I would like to query it in practice,
e.g. ask a server for <Article, comment, ?> and get back all the objects
(structure of which are unspecified, as per the extensibility we've both
pointed to).


>
>
>> If my suggestions disenfranchise some community, name that community and
>> show me its use case(s).
>>
>
> The thing is, this working group did not boil out of the ether. It's the
> product of more than six years of effort by the principals. I'd encourage
> you to do your homework. There are plenty of reports and other information
> at websites like openannotation.org and the open annotation community
> group.
>

It's a community I've been following pretty closely for about four years
now, so if I'm missing information please try to stretch your patience
rather than talk down to me.


>  Reread section 1, the model clearly (though verbosely) asserts 'Bookmark'
> relatedTo Thing.
>

I don't see that anywhere in the model specification, unless you infer some
particular relatedTo predicate from an arbitrary vocabulary from the
English language description, "conveys that the body is related to the
target".


> An annotation is an instance of a named graph, like all RDF graphs. Not
> all named graphs are annotations.
>

In our current model this is not true, and that's why I raised this thread.

The annotation is the root of a contiguous graph fragment. It cannot, for
example, convey disjoint subgraphs. It is not a dataset, it is a particular
resource.


> We need to agree how they can express these things in a way that
> disagreements about particulars can happen. But also, having mechanisms by
> which some level of agreement is possible, e.g., using SKOS for
> motivations, is helpful for very large scale aggregation and computing.
>

I understand the purpose of SKOS for extending motivations as a way to
increase interop by suggesting that people define their new motivations in
relation to existing ones.

I still don't understand why those motivations are not themselves, or do
not imply normative relations, between the bodies and targets.


> Not all relations are best expressed by predicates. Many relations have
> properties unique to themselves. The annotating relationship is one of
> these. If I just have the triple :_a relatedTo :_b then I've lost who made
> the assertion and when it was made (unless I'm working with quads or quints
> - a possibility). Expanding the predicate into a node and a pair of
> predicates allows us to represent the full breadth of the relation's
> metadata. What is and isn't a relationship is a matter of context and
> perspective.
>

The annotation provides a subject for extended attributes about the
activity, I'm still just asking why one of those attributes, which is about
the reason for relating the bodies and targets, cannot be interpreted in a
consistent way to imply a particular relation.

Thanks.