Re: Web annotations for physical texts

Hi Steven,

Some thoughts on your questions…

CTS URNs are for machine-actionable identification and retrieval of passages of text, so their job really is different from that of a human-readable label. In our projects we use the plain text CEX format ( https://cite-architecture.github.io/citedx/CEX-spec-3.0.1/ ) for capturing data and loading it into services, and it is at that level that we can attach human-readable labels to works and editions. 

Here’s a link that will (after a short delay, the server seems a little slow today) deliver a passage of text, with a label attached (and linked commentaries and some other stuff):

http://www.homermultitext.org/hmt-digital/index.html?urn=urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0012.tlg001.msA:1.1-1.5

As for citing a page of a book… CTS really is about _texts_ rather than _books_. A CTS-URN captures the semantics of a “text” defined as “an ordered hierarchy of citation objects”.. 

For our texts, at least, pages in a physical edition constitute a structure orthogonal to the citation-hieararchy of a work. 

So I don’t think there is a low-friction way to bend CTS away from canonically citable (= citations independent of any particular expression of a text) texts to texts citable only by pages in a particular printed edition.

We associate CTS texts with “pages”, but it involves quite a bit of integration. This might be way more than you want to get into, but to give an example…

http://www.homermultitext.org/hmt-digital/index.html?urn=urn:cite2:hmt:msA.v1:12r

The above is a URL that will display an object in an ordered collection of manuscript folios; "urn:cite2:hmt:msA.v1:12r” identifies folio 12-recto of a physical manuscript. 

And this is a record that identifies a graph of (a) a passage of text (CtsUrn), (b) a physical folio (Cite2Urn), and (c) a digital image mapping the passage on the folio:

http://www.homermultitext.org/hmt-digital/index.html?urn=urn:cite2:hmt:va_dse.v1:il10

Cheers,
Chris B.


--
Christopher W. Blackwell
The Louis G. Forgione University Professor
Department of Classics
Furman University

> On Oct 13, 2018, at 4:14 AM, Steven Harms <sgharms@stevengharms.com> wrote:
> 
> Given two endorsements for CTS in short order, I read the description and it seemed intuitive and to cover the required specificity easily. As such:
> 
> urn:cts:CTSNAMESPACE:WORK:PASSAGE@SUBREFERENCE
> 
> Would become
> 
> urn:cts:isbn:###:<PASSAGE>
> 
> Pros:
> 
> 1. Intuitive!
> 
> Cons:
> 
> 1. With ISBN we lose the human friendliness of say, “JK Rowling wrote HP&Philospher’s stone.” This can be remedied, of course, by a higher container holding human-friendly data, but it seems like an obvious nit to address. MLA and other citation schemes preserve this visibly in the citation. 
> 
> Question:
> 
> 1. How to handle <PASSAGE> in a book?
> 
> Pasting the full text seems onerous. To annotate passage p, I don’t want to have to type in passage p *and* my annotation. This would also set one afoul of copyright holders. 
> 
> Further, range offsets, while completely reasonable are not given generally outside of epic poetry or other classics.
> 
> Certainly many e-readers make this calculation possible and that will surely be the correct scheme for annotations from that medium. However, my focus remains real books ;)
> 
> The most common scheme for a popular book would be the page. The docs state, failing an offset:
> 
> > A reference to an individual passage is formatted as dot-separated components representing one or more levels of the citation hierarchy defined in a CTS TextInventory for that work.
> 
> Now for most popular works, there is no CTS TextInventory — to the best of my knowledge.
> 
> So: is there a low-friction way to refer to a page?
> 
> Thanks for the suggestions to now,
> 
> Steven
> 
> 
> (Typos and blunders my own as i’m On vacation without access to a keyboard ;))
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Oct 11, 2018 at 3:54 AM Christopher Blackwell <cwblackwell@gmail.com <mailto:cwblackwell@gmail.com>> wrote:
> Dear Steven,
> 
> The CTS URN might be helpful:
> 
>  http://cite-architecture.github.io/ctsurn/ <http://cite-architecture.github.io/ctsurn/>
> 
> Part of the CITE Architecture: http://cite-architecture.github.io <http://cite-architecture.github.io/>
> 
> (Disclosure: This is a thing I’ve worked on over the years.)
> 
> This blog post points to some live examples of real data integrated with CTS URNs: 
> 
>  http://homermultitext.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-homer-multitext-microservice-homer.html <http://homermultitext.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-homer-multitext-microservice-homer.html>
> 
> If this looks at all interesting, please don’t hesitate to send along further questions.
> 
> Cheers,
> Chris B.
> 
> 
> --
> Christopher W. Blackwell
> The Louis G. Forgione University Professor
> Department of Classics
> Furman University
> 
>> On Oct 10, 2018, at 1:57 PM, Steven Harms <sgharms@stevengharms.com <mailto:sgharms@stevengharms.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> Greetings,
>> 
>> I am interested in creating annotations on physical books [1 <https://stevengharms.com/research/semweb-topic/problem_statement/>].
>> 
>> As the name "web annotations" suggests, the default target of the Web Annotation Working Group would be, of course, to annotation IRI-referable targets with IRI-identifiable Annotations.
>> 
>> 1. Is there a model whereby we could point to a physical resource in a URI / IRI format (and thus join the existing Web Annotation universe, *or*
>> 2. Is there a framework that might support referring to physical books that I've simply not found
>> 3. Or should I plan to use JSON-LD to create "forge my own path?"
>> 
>> I hope to post an example of what #3 might look like, but I'd like to double check my understanding before engaging in in such an effort, tabula rasa.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> 
>> Steven
>> 
>> 
>> [1]: https://stevengharms.com/research/semweb-topic/problem_statement/ <https://stevengharms.com/research/semweb-topic/problem_statement/>
>> 
>> -- 
>> Steven G. Harms
>> PGP: E6052DAF <https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x337AF45BE6052DAF>
> -- 
> Steven G. Harms
> PGP: E6052DAF <https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x337AF45BE6052DAF>