RE: Use Cases

So here's another idea for consideration for the Note on Annotation Use
Cases. It stems from discussions about methods we might use to curate
retrospectively digitized texts such as are found in the HathiTrust.
Reactions?

 

Repeated Segment Annotations

 

A user wishes to target for annotation segments of a resource that appear
more than once in that resource, termed here for convenience 'repeated
segments' (e.g., a string, node or name that appears multiple times in a
single digitized book). For the purposes of what's being expressed in the
annotation, the user does not need to know (has not determined a priori) the
exact number of times the repeated segment appears in the resource; the
interpretation of the annotation is understood to be independent of the
number of instances of the repeated segment in the resource. This use case
is defined to address situations where the body of the annotation relates in
the same way to each repeated segment instance. Similarly for a body
comprised of repeated segments. 

 

Examples

 

·         A copy editor creates an annotation proposing a correction to
replace all instances of the string "pleaf'd" with the string "pleas'd".
Essentially the annotation is proposing a search and replace operation of
the sort ubiquitous in modern word processing systems. 

·         A manufacturer wishes to annotate all products of a certain class
in his products database with a note that these items will go on sale next
week for 15% off for 2 weeks only. 

·         A publisher wishes to associate an annotation containing an
updated email address with all author nodes having the value "Jane A. Smith"
that appear in last year's journal volume.

 

Notes

 

·         In the absence of an oa:State triple, the annotation would be
assumed persistent even if some instances of the repeated segment are
removed from the resource or  if additional instances of the repeated
segment are added to the resource. The annotation is rendered inoperative
(nonsense) only if all instances of the repeated segment are removed.

·         While challenging to address, this use case should be addressed
since it can happen inadvertently as well as intentionally. Certain classes
of selectors will be prone to describing/identifying segments that occur
multiple times in a resource.  For example, in a lengthy text there is some
small but finite chance that there will be more than one match for the same
oa:exact, oa:prefix, and oa:suffix combination (e.g., the constituents of an
oa:TextQuoteSelector).  As has already come up, we can anticipate that
communities will want to begin using other kinds of selectors, e.g., CSS,
XPath/XPpointer, SQL-based, SPARQL-based, etc. that have an even greater
probability of describing and identifying repeated segments in a lengthy
resource. 

·         A further extension of this use case (or perhaps the slippery
slope reason not to allow) might be its potential use with multiplicity
constructs.

 

I suspect that the 'data selector' discussion that Bob, Paolo and others
have raised previously in other threads (most recently in
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-openannotation/2014Feb/0011.html)
is relevant here in terms of how the current OA model might be applied or if
necessary extended to implement this use case. Though this suggestion was
stimulated by the copy edit example (which has come up most recently in the
context of the HathiTrust Research Center), there is perhaps in fact a lot
of overlap with various data query use cases.  

 

A relevant question (I think) is whether (in the context of RDF and OA) we
can unambiguously give identity as a single Resource (e.g., as an extension
of the oa:SpecificResource class)  to what is essentially a not yet
enumerated ad hoc aggregation of oa:SpecificResources?  Perhaps there's a
bit of a Schrödinger's Cat issue lurking here. 

 

Thanks,

 

Tim Cole

University of Illinois at UC

 

 

 

 

From: Robert Sanderson [mailto:azaroth42@gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, February 24, 2014 4:52 PM
To: public-openannotation
Subject: Use Cases

 

 

Dear all,

 

The W3C Digital Publishing Interest Group is going to publish a working
draft of a Note on Annotation use cases in the near future.  I have put a
pre-working draft (whatever that means :) ) of the text up at:

 

  http://www.openannotation.org/usecases.html

 

Any comments, corrections, additions, etc are very welcome!

 

Thanks,

 

Rob

 

P.S. Bob, unfortunately data annotation directly isn't in scope of the IG
work, but I've included it under the embedded resource use case to try and
promote the discussion.