FW: open annotation / media fragments

Dear all,

 

 

Attached a mail from a colleague from another consortium asking if their UC
for Fragments could be in-scope of our MF group. To be discussed!

 

 

Sincere greetings,

 

Erik

 

From: Herbert van de Sompel [mailto:hvdsomp@gmail.com] 
Sent: donderdag 1 oktober 2009 20:19
To: erik.mannens@ugent.be
Cc: hvdsomp@gmail.com; azaroth42@gmail.com
Subject: open annotation / media fragments

 

Dear Erik,

As I mentioned while at WWW2009, I am involved in the Open Annotation
Project (http://www.openannotation.org) that aims at creating specs and
demonstrators of an interoperable annotation environment. The focus is on
annotating scholarly resources, but the project takes a generic
resource-centric perspective, and the requirements go beyond what is covered
by the W3C's Annotea. It is our impression, BTW, that there's quite some
people that feel like Annotea needs some serious revision anyhow in light of
extensive evolutions since its conception. Annotea is definitely inspiring
but it needs some clarification and extension at the least.

Anyhow, as you can imagine, fragment addressing is an utterly important
aspect in our annotation framework requirements, and hence we are delighted
with the W3C Media Fragment effort. It is clear that our framework will be
able to leverage the proposed "temporal", "spatial", "track", and "named"
approaches. So, many thanks for your work on this!

However, while discussing our annotating requirements, we came across a type
of use case that we think is currently not covered by the Media Fragment
proposal, and for which we will need a solution. Generally speaking, it is
about cases where the resource fragment that needs to be annotated can not
be specified by means of any of the proposed "inline fragment specification"
approaches, but rather would need to be defined by means of a pointer to a
special-purpose machine-readable document in which the fragment is
specified. And the nature/content of that document would most likely depend
on the type of resource one needs to specify a fragment for. 

An example would be an image resource - say - URI-IMG, where a third party
(not the author) wants to externally specify an arbitrary (non-rectangular)
region of the resource and subsequently wants to annotate it. In this case,
one could create a separate resource (e.g. an SVG document) - say -
URI-FRAG-DESC in which the to-be-annotated region would be described. And,
then, following the # convention proposed in the media Fragment work, one
could specify the region as: URI-IMG#description:URI-FRAG-DESC. In essence,
the idea here is that of a by-reference instead of a by-value description of
the fragment.

The SVG example is just one instance of a rather general class of problems,
we think. There's only that much one can put by-value in a fragment. Another
example that comes to mind is annotation of slices/views of scientific
datasets, regions in a 3D resource, and one could even think of addressing
arbitrary regions of HTML using a by-ref description. 

I wonder whether this class of problems fits in the scope of the Media
Fragment work, and if so, whether it is something that you would be willing
to further discuss and maybe even take on board. It goes without saying that
we would be very happy to provide help if that were deemed appropriate
and/or welcome. 

I look forward to hearing from you. I hope all is well.

Greetings

Herbert

-- 
Herbert Van de Sompel
Digital Library Research & Prototyping
Los Alamos National Laboratory, Research Library
http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/