Semantic Tagging and Motivation

[1] carries the text "As explained in the Motivation section,
Annotations that tag resources, either with text or semantic tags,
SHOULD also have the oa:tagging motivation to make the reason for the
Annotation more clear to applications, and MAY have other motivations
as well."

But actually, by my reading, the Motivation section [2] does not in
fact say that.  Rather it seems only to say that every Annotation
should have a motivation.

Indeed, I'm \glad/ that the Motivations section does not urge the
oa:tagging motivation on several grounds:
(a). Doing so would really be kind of a throwback to the idea in the
previous OA draft that Motivations classify Annotations, and I've
always believed we were well rid of that.
(b). I think there are more fundamental Knowledge Representation
reasons for tagging than Motivation ---at least for Semantic Tagging.
To me, classifying the object of hasBody as a SemanticTag and hanging
domain properties on \it/  gives a clean way to specify the particular
domain relation(s) between the Target and another domain object.  This
could be done directly by just making that object be the Body, and
asserting the relation directly, but this is fraught with
complications: it doesn't provide the provenance of the assertion that
an annotation does; it is subject to contradiction by assertions
altogether unconnected to the annotation (which with a SemanticTag
could be made moot by making the SemanticTag an anonymous node), and
probably others.
(c). In our data annotation use cases so far, tagging for tagging's
sake is never an issue so it's a stretch to call it a motivation.
(d). If the editors remove the aforementioned sentence "As
explained....SHOULD ...", then Anna Gerber's fabulous lorestore OA
validator [3] and its ruleset will stop bugging me about lacking an
oa:tagging motivation. :-)

Bob Morris

[1] http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/20130208/core.html#Tagging
[2] http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/20130208/core.html#Motivations
[3] http://austese.net/lorestore/validate.html
--
Robert A. Morris

Emeritus Professor  of Computer Science
UMASS-Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd
Boston, MA 02125-3390

IT Staff
Filtered Push Project
Harvard University Herbaria
Harvard University

email: morris.bob@gmail.com
web: http://efg.cs.umb.edu/
web: http://wiki.filteredpush.org
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram
===
The content of this communication is made entirely on my
own behalf and in no way should be deemed to express
official positions of The University of Massachusetts at Boston or
Harvard University.

Received on Sunday, 12 May 2013 03:22:23 UTC