Re: Proposed W3C Charter: Annotation Working Group (until 2014-08-19)

Hi, Luc–

On 8/13/14 2:48 PM, Luc Moreau wrote:
>
> This is an interesting charter tackling an important need.  I am
> supportive of it.  I have a couple of comments/suggestions.

Thanks!


> Given that the charter makes explicit reference to provenance, I think
> it should also refer to the Provenance Working Group and/or PROV in
> section 3. Furthermore, the Open Annotation Data Model was building on
> W3C PROV. Thus, it is important that provenance-related aspects
> specified by the Annotation Working Group remain compatible with PROV.
> This should be part of the charter.

We made a deliberate choice to reference as few specific technologies in 
the charter as possible, especially since this is new chartered work 
that still needs some exploration. We want these technical decisions to 
be made by the Web Annotations WG, not by the charter.

That said, as you note, one of the primary inputs to this WG which is 
mentioned explicitly is the Open Annotation Data Model by the eponymous 
community group, and it does specifically reference W3C PROV [1][2], so 
it seems likely that we will use W3C PROV (and very unlikely that we 
would roll our own or go without a provenance model); the simplest 
solution that is compatible with W3C PROV is likely to win the day.

As you know, the Provenance WG is no longer active, so we could not list 
them as one of our liaisons.


> It would be useful to clarify which media types beyond HTML5, if any,
> the proposed working intends to focus on for Robust Link Anchoring.
> In the Provenance Working Group, for a short period, there were
> discussions about annotations of provenance.  I am not expecting
> anchoring on provenance to be in scope of this future Working Group,
> but it would be nice if its anchoring model could be general enough,
> to be instantiable (which implies shareable, archivable, etc) for
> provenance.

Again, we did not want to constrain the list of media types that we may 
target for the robust anchoring. Instead, we chose to call out HTML5 as 
one that we are specifically targeting, and explicitly mandated an 
extension point for other media types, so that those in the WG (and 
elsewhere) interested in working on a particular media type could do so, 
while not obligating the WG to deliver anything else.

(Personally, I plan to work on anchors for HTML, SVG, images, and maps; 
I know others are interested in data, video, audio, and other media 
types. There's a lot to do here! It'll be fun!)


I realize that this gives you little new information (or commitment), 
but I hope you understand our pragmatic, less-is-more approach to 
chartering this WG, and our desire to give them free rein to find the 
best technical solutions. And if you are interested in the topic, we 
welcome your participation and expertise once the WG is formed!


[1] http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/core.html#Provenance
[2] http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/appendices.html#ProvMapping

Regards-
-Doug

Received on Wednesday, 13 August 2014 19:29:26 UTC