Re: Plain textual bodies - summary of arguments and possible solutions

Apologies to all for the dumb questions from a publishing layman:  does
this approach work for ebooks in the same format and for ebooks in multiple
formats?   That is, will the model enable ebook designers and ebook system
developers to offer users the ability to annotate any aspect of the work
and share the annotation with another user such that the other user is able
to see the shared annotation attached to, or pointing to, the annotated
target in his/her version of the ebook?

The question applies to all downloaded ebook-like documents and formats.
 Publishers of fiction, non-fiction, educational works, professional and
academic works, etc., will be looking for open and practical ways for
readers to place, track and locate annotations within a single instance of
a work and, when sharing or transferring annotations, across multiple
instances of a work.

Cheers,
BobB

On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 4:51 AM, Bernhard Haslhofer <
bernhard.haslhofer@cornell.edu> wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I think the current discussion on supporting plain text (literal) bodies
> in the Open Annotation model is important because there are many real-world
> annotation use cases that attach such bodies to Web resources (e.g.,
> Flickr). Therefore I spent some time to summarize existing pro and con
> arguments and came up with possible solutions (with some help from Antoine)
> for representing plain text (literal) bodies.
>
> Here is the Wikipage:
> http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/wiki/Textual_Bodies
>
> Apologies in advance, I tried to find and cite all arguments in the spec
> and the previous thread as precisely as possible, but might have missed one
> or the other. So please fix the arguments directly in the wiki. If there
> are other possible solutions, please add them...
>
> It seems that there are two possible solutions at the moment:
>
> 1.) Allow Literals for oa:hasBody
>
> 2.) Introduce a shortcut property (e.g., oa:hasLiteralBody) for plain text
> bodies
>
> I think both solutions are feasible and meet the goal of "remaining simple
> enough to also allow for the most common use cases, such as attaching a
> piece of text to a single web resource", mentioned in the introduction.
>
> If I had to choose now, I would probably prefer the first option because I
> am not (yet) convinced by the counter-arguments and it avoids the
> introduction of another property. Also, the motivation for using OA in our
> context (maphub, yuma, etc.) is sharing and exchanging annotation data on
> the Web and not building a formal knowledge base one can use for
> inferencing; therefore also allowing literals as bodies could easily be
> handled by an additional "if body.isLiteral?" condition in any OA parser.
>
> However, I understand that inferencing and therefore consistency is rather
> important for some other use cases, which brings me back to the second
> option as a possible compromise.
>
> Best,
> Bernhard
>
>
>


-- 
Robert Bolick
Books On Books <http://www.scoop.it/t/books-on-books> site
My Profile <http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/robert-bolick/4/8bb/ba2> site