Re: Annotation Serializations

Hi Doug, everybody,

I try to understand what you mean... Are we talking about some sort of a family of use case templates? Or a formal and thorough serialization specification in HTML, ie, some sort of a specialized RDFa? The latter may be quite a lot of work... (having gone through the RDFa exercise myself). A template library could probably be done more easily; for RDF usage one could then make some sort of a preprocessor to RDFa, and then let the existing RDFa processors take over.

I looked at your example, and, for the purpose of the discussion, I did re-cast it into RDFa Lite. I *think* it is what you meant but probably not exactly; I did remove the internal properties for Bush because you annotate <http://example.com/sourcedoc.html> and not the snippet and, I must admit, I was not sure how that 'cite' would translate into OA (I am not sure it can, it may need some additional properties). I was also not sure whether the tagging is properly mapped onto the OA. With that, I believe the snippet below is more-or-less correct:

    <aside vocab="http://www.w3.org/ns/oa#" typeof="Annotation">
      <p>
        <a property="annotatedBy" href="http://example.com/people/shepazu" typeof="foaf:Person">
           <span property="foaf:name">Shepazu</span>
         </a>
      </p>
      <time property="annotatedAt" datetime="2014-01-14T01:28:22-0500">
        <a href="http://example.com/annotations/shepazu-1389680902"
           title="1:28 AM - 14 Jan 2014">A few minutes ago</a>
      </time>

      <blockquote property="hasTarget"
                  resource="http://example.com/sourcedoc.html"
                  cite="http://example.com/sourcedoc.html"
                  data-prefix="essential feature of the memex. "
                  data-suffix=" When the user is building a tra" typeof="">
        <p>The process of tying two items together is the important thing.</p>
        <footer>
          - <cite>
                 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush">
                    <span>Vannevar Bush</span>
                 </a>
            </cite>
        </footer>
      </blockquote>
      <p property="hasBody" typeof=""><span property="rdf:value">Annotations are at the Web's core.</span></p>
      <ul property="hasBody" typeof="SemanticTag">
         <li property="rdf:value">annotations</li>
         <li property="rdf:value">web</li>
         <li property="rdf:value">standards</li>
      </ul>
    </aside>

There are some quirks, because I tried to keep it within RDFa Lite (mainly the usage of @typeof=""). Also, RDFa+HTML5 does not understand the @cite attribute in <blockquote>; it could be easily added to RDFa Lite, if there is a great demand for it, but that would require some extra spec rounds. Hence the @resource attribute that repeats the URI :-(

I believe the correct mapping to OA is to have two different bodies; one is your remark, the other are the tags. (I have added the generated Turtle at the end, where I have taken out some statements that an RDFa processor generates into the resulting graph, but is irrelevant for us here.)

Yes, it is slightly more complex than your thing. (Note that, I believe, mapping this to microdata would be even more complex; indeed, microdata does not allow mixing different vocabularies, like I do here with OA and foaf and rdf.) I am not sure which direction one should/could take in simplifying it.

But... I have also generated a JSON-LD code from the RDFa above, and then simplified it (my JSON-LD knowledge is not perfect, but I have checked it by a JSON-LD checker):

{
    "@context": "http://www.w3.org/ns/oa.json",
    "@type": "Annotation",
    "annotatedAt": "2014-01-14T01:28:22-0500",
    "annotatedBy": {
        "@id": "http://example.com/people/shepazu",
        "name": "Shepazu",
        "@type" : "Person"
    },
    "hasBody": [
        {
            "value" : "Annotations are at the Web's core."
        },
        {
            "@type": "SemanticTag",
            "value": [
                "web",
                "standards",
                "annotations"
            ]
        }
    ],
    "hasTarget": "http://example.com/sourcedoc.html"

}

with the supposition that the oa.json contains a lot of information on mapping the data to RDF that can be hidden from the end user, like the fact that 'value' or 'Person' are terms from another vocabulary (RDF and FOAF, respectively). In this sense, JSON-LD is more flexible than RDFa. For a JSON user the only slightly unusual thing is the usage of the "@" character. The "@context" can also be omitted for those who do not want to care about RDF; actually, if used on the Web, the context can also be transferred through an HTTP header.

I actually find the JSON-LD the simplest. And I begin to wonder whether we really have annotations themselves marked up in HTML, or, more exactly, whether that is a major use case. I have the impression that annotations are built up through user interactions and are stored somewhere, and the storage would not necessarily happen in HTML but, rather, in JSON (e.g., in a JSON database, or something like that).

(Note that it is also possible to embed a JSON(-LD) snippet into an HTML file[1]. This is an approach that the schema.org people have also done for some of their clients[2].)

Ivan

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld/#embedding-json-ld-in-html-documents
[2] http://blog.schema.org/2013/06/schemaorg-and-json-ld.html


P.S. Here is the turtle:

@prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> .
@prefix oa: <http://www.w3.org/ns/oa#> .
@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .

<http://example.com/people/shepazu> a foaf:Person ;
    foaf:name "Shepazu" .

[] a oa:Annotation ;
    oa:annotatedAt "2014-01-14T01:28:22-0500" ;
    oa:annotatedBy <http://example.com/people/shepazu> ;
    oa:hasBody 
        [ rdf:value "Annotations are at the Web's core." ],
        [ a oa:SemanticTag ;
            rdf:value "annotations", "standards", "web" 
        ] ;
    oa:hasTarget <http://example.com/sourcedoc.html> .


On 19 Jan 2014, at 24:29 , Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org> wrote:

> Hi, folks–
> 
> The work this group has done so far is excellent. I think the data model is really solid. I'd like to see it applied broadly, not just for annotations proper, but also for comments, footnotes, bookmarks, and other similar things along the same lines.
> 
> And I'd like annotations to be supported by browsers natively; I think that would dramatically increase their usage and usability.
> 
> To that end, I'd like to introduce a few topics that I think can build on the data model, and couch it in terms that the average web developer can easily understand and apply, and which browser vendors might get behind.
> 
> The first of these is some suggestions on different serializations, for those who aren't interested in the RDF aspects (yes, hard to believe, but such people do exist!).
> 
> Here's a (terrible, almost certainly incorrect) strawman for an HTML serialization of an annotation (consider it the bastard child of OpenAnnotation and Twitter):
> 
> <aside vocab="http://www.w3.org/ns/oa#">
>   <p>
>     <a property="annotatedBy"
>         href="http://example.com/people/shepazu"
>         typeof="Person">
>        <span property="name">Shepazu</span>
>      </a>
>   </p>
> 
>   <time property="annotatedAt" datetime="2014-01-14T01:28:22-0500">
>     <a href="http://example.com/annotations/shepazu-1389680902"
>        title="1:28 AM - 14 Jan 2014">A few minutes ago</a>
>   </time>
> 
>   <blockquote property="hasTarget"
>               cite="http://example.com/sourcedoc.html"
>               data-prefix="essential feature of the memex. "
>               data-suffix=" When the user is building a tra">
>     <p>The process of tying two items together is the important thing.</p>
>     <footer>
>       – <cite>
> 	         <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush"
> 	            typeof="Person">
>             <span property="name">Vannevar Bush</span>
> 	         </a>
>         </cite>
>     </footer>
>   </blockquote>
> 
>   <p property="hasBody">Annotations are at the Web’s core.</p>
> 
>    <ul>
>      <li property="tag">annotations</li>
>      <li property="tag">web</li>
>      <li property="tag">standards</li>
>    </ul>
> </aside>
> 
> 
> Another serialization could be in very lightweight JSON, for sockets interchange.
> 
> All of these serializations should be defined in such a way that they are losslessly transformable into any of the other serializations; any missing data (for example, values omitted for brevity) should have default (or lacunae) values that are populated for other serializations that might need them, such as RDF.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> 
> Regards-
> -Doug
> 


----
Ivan Herman, W3C 
Digital Publishing Activity Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
mobile: +31-641044153
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