EARL and annotations

There are fun things brewing to make EARL work.

proposed is to get some of the W3C validation tools to output EARL and store
it using the Annotation service developed at W3C.

Annotations: (for real information see the Annotea Project itself -
http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/ - this is a very potted guide)

The idea is that you can say something about a URI (page, part of a page,
etc) and define what type of thing you are saying - comment, seeAlso, defect,
etc. It uses RDF for this, so EARL could be happily integrated.

You then post what you said to a server, and it stores that information as an
out-of-line link to the original thing you commented about. (Effectively this
is a subset of Xlink) and can retrieve annotations.

People who have new versions of Amaya can do this on a per-element basis.
There are also services that will work from any browser, but we haven't yet
figured out how to post an annotation to an element from a random browser,
unless you write the fragment identifier by hand (which you can do).

Tools can be made to post the annotations or get them just as well as people,
and since there is rdf information stored as the annotation it can be
processed by a tool.

for example, the XHTML validator might look through a document and discover
that some elements have missing alt attributes. So it makes the annotation as
well as teling the user directly. Then the user opens the page in their
editor, queries the annotations, and the images in question get marked. The
user fixes them as desired, and the annotations are modified to show that the
problem has gone away.

another example: the Wave asks a user to look through and confirm that the
alt text for each image is actually good. The user does this for half the
images, and gets bored so stops. the Wave annotates the images that are known
to be good, along with information about who said so, when, and what the
state of the page/images was. Next time the user runs the Wave, she asks to
only identify suspicious or unkown alternatives. So it doesn't bother
presenting her with all the images that are noted as having been ok.

I would like this to be the agenda item for the next joint ER/AU meeting at
the beginning of May. I hope that someone who has been working on the annotea
project will also be able to join us.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI    fax: +1 617 258 5999
Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
(or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)

Received on Friday, 6 April 2001 13:48:40 UTC