Proposal to keep motivatedBy as a property of Annotation

You'll recall from the results of the CFC and the discussions we had on the
WG's 2 September call
(http://www.w3.org/2015/09/02-annotation-minutes.html), that we decided to
go forward with the approach for adding role to SpecificResource and
EmbeddedContent objects as outlined in Section 3.1 of
http://w3c.github.io/web-annotation/model/wd/roles.html#proposed-model-revis
ion.  However, 1 or 2 of the issues outlined in section 3.2 (Further
Considerations) of that document remain to be resolved before model can be
updated. 

 

Ivan, Ray and I took a look at one of these open issues, 3.2.5 Remove
motivatedBy [as a property of oa:Annotation] completely.  In the end we
created an additional page providing use cases / illustrations of why we
think we need to retain the Annotation-level motivatedBy property: 

 

  http://w3c.github.io/web-annotation/model/wd/AnnoLevelMotive.html

 

Please take a look at this page and offer comments, counter-point arguments,
agreement, etc. as appropriate. Feel free to respond directly on this thread
if that makes most sense.

 

In summary, we concluded that Annotation-level motivatedBy property should
be retained in order to support 3 relatively common, intuitive and
compelling use cases:

 

*         Needing to express Motivation of the Annotation as a Whole (as
distinct from expressing the role of an individual body or target)

*         Needing to express Motivation in the Absence of a Body

*         Needing to express Motivation for an Annotation having a Single,
Simple Textual Body (and thereby obviate the need to transform Simple
Textual Body into SpecificResource or EmbeddedContent)

 

Key to this discussion are the questions of 

1.       whether these uses are important or minimal now that we can express
the role of individual SpecificResource and EmbeddedContent objects, and 

2.       whether there is a high or low risk of developers confusing
Annotation motivatedBy and SpecificResource hasRole and as a result create
Annotations that are difficult to understand / process when aggregated.

 

Thanks,

 

Tim Cole

University of Illinois at UC