Re: Rich Annotation System Proposal

On Nov 6, 2007, at 9:38 PM, Achille Fokoue wrote:

> Thanks Bijan for putting together this proposal. It is a good start  
> to address issues surrounding the current annotation system.
>
> I have two concerns:
>
> 1.  It is not clear to me from your proposal whether *all*  
> annotations are now considered axioms – not just EntityAnnotation  
> in the current spec.

The current proposal punted on this.

>  I agree with jlc415 who reported issue 16 (http://www.w3.org/2007/ 
> OWL/tracker/issues/16) that “either all annotations should be  
> axioms, or none should”. Having all annotations as axioms makes it  
> possible to annotate them. This is especially useful since we now  
> plan to have annotations (“mustUnderstand” annotations) that can  
> change the semantics of axioms and entities.  For example, one  
> might want to annotate with provenance information a  
> “mustUnderstand” annotation.  I am open to other mechanisms  
> allowing annotations (“mustUnderstand” annotations in particular)  
> to be annotated.

This could be easily incorporated. I just hacked the minimal changes  
to the grammar I could to get the proposal done as soon as possible.  
So this seems a great addition.

> 2.  For an annotationByBlob, which enables arbitrary assertions,  
> limiting the content to facts makes sense.  However, allowing  
> arbitrary XML, as you suggested could be done in principle, might  
> raise issues related to the translation of arbitrary XML content  
> into RDF.

Well, my thought is that not all annotations need be translatable to  
RDF. If someone wants to associate, I don't know, SVG or SVG  
fragments with some entity or axioms...who am I to disagree? Or  
perhaps someone wants to use a RIF XML dialect, or what have you. I  
don't see a huge advantage in *requiring* a property to a literal in  
the annotation, though that's probably harmless, just a little  
annoying for the XML person.

>  To avoid these issues, I think we can, in principle, allow  
> arbitrary RDF/XML content instead of arbitrary XML.

I'm personally not strongly moved either way. I prefer a bit more  
freedom than less, but shrug.

Cheers,
Bijan.

Received on Tuesday, 6 November 2007 22:32:11 UTC