[LD4LT] annotations on the web: quick survey

Dear all,

in the last decade, we have seen the emergence of several specifications
for creating and sharing (NLP) annotations on the web in a linked-data
compliant fashion, most importantly,
- NIF 2.0 (https://persistence.uni-leipzig.org/nlp2rdf/, stable),
- NIF 2.1 (https://nif.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, experimental) and
- Web Annotation (https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/, standardized).

In the context of the Pret-a-LLOD project (https://www.pret-a-llod.eu/), we
are currently developing a toolbox for the transformation of legacy
annotations, resp., the output of serveral NLP tools, and we need to make
some strategic decisions to what extent to support, and possibly, to extend
any of these vocabularies.

In my personal impression, Web Annotation gained a lot of ground in the
last years, and beyond BioNL (where it emerged), it is now much used in
Digital Humanities, for example. My feeling is that NIF (albeit there *are*
external providers of NIF data) has been somewhat less successful in
broadening its range of users since 2015, but I might miss something.

I understand that NIF 2.0/2.1 are to some extent outcomes of the activities
of this group, so I was wondering how much it is still being used by the
people in this community. In particular, I would like to know:

- Do you run or know about WA compliant web services (public or in-house)?
- Do you run or know about any NIF 2.0 web services (public or in-house)?
- Do you run or know about any NIF web services that actively use the NIF
2.1 extensions?
- Do you provide or know about WA-compliant data sets available on the web
under an open license?
- Do you provide or know about NIF 2.0-compliant data available on the web
under an open license?
- Do you provide or know about any NIF data sets that actively use the NIF
2.1 extensions?
- Do you provide web services or data sets that use other LD-compliant*
vocabularies for linguistic annotations (e.g., the LAPPS Interchange
Format)?
- For resources/webservices developed since 2014: Do you provide web
services or interlinked data sets using other, non-LD compliant
vocabularies for linguistic annotations (e.g., Concrete, or JSON-NLP)? If
so, what has been your motivation for doing so? If the reason was the range
of available tools, which functionalities were most important?

* By LD compliancy I mean full-fledged RDF in any serialization (incl.
CSV2RDF, JSON-LD or access via a SPARQL end point), not just the use of
URIs (which is far too common to count).

Please feel free to respond via the mailing list or to contact me
privately. I plan to post a summary of private responses in that case. Note
that this is not about abandoning NIF, but about exporing its future
relationship and possible synergies with WebAnnotation and other
vocabularies.

Thanks a lot,
Christian
-- 
Christian Chiarcos
Applied Computational Linguistics
Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt a. M.
60054 Frankfurt am Main, Germany

office: Robert-Mayer-Str. 11-15, room 107
mail: chiarcos@informatik.uni-frankfurt.de
web: http://acoli.cs.uni-frankfurt.de
tel: +49-(0)69-798-22463
fax: +49-(0)69-798-28931