Re: Types of annotation

Hi, Phil.

At 04:28 PM 10/12/2000 +0100, Phil Cross wrote:
...
>I feel it is necessary to somehow differentiate between these different
>annotation types, so that it is easy to see what is available for a
>particular site, and separate annotations by type when presenting them
>to users; the question is, what is the best way of doing this?

You give a nice concise motivation for the question.  I'll open
with the caveat that there might not be one "best".  We can
share our ideas and see which of them survive the test of
implementation and time.

>The basic structure for the RDF triples of comments or annotations, that
>we currently use, is to have an annotationID as a unique ID, which has
>properties such as 'annotates' (for the URI of the Web page), DC.Title,
>DC.subject, etc.

That sounds nearly identical to what we've been doing in
an annotation service design here in a "live early adoption"
project at W3C.  We talked about it at WWW9 DevDay and
have continued to work on it as time permits.  We're very
close to being comfortable showing it more publicly again.

"The W3C Collaborative Web Annotation Project ... or how to have
fun while building an RDF infrastructure"
http://www.w3.org/2000/Talks/www9-annotations/
announced in
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-annotation/2000JanJun/0023.html

>  I'm wondering if we should add an extra property called
>annotationType, and try and define some standard values for this. Or
>perhaps the 'annotates' property itself should have subclasses (e.g.
>'comments' or 'evaluates', or should the annotationID be subclassed?

We have defined a generic annotation class and then subclasses
of that to declare 'types' of annotations.  We use the rdf:type property
to convey the class of a specific instance of an annotation; that is,
the semantic intent of the author when the annotation was created.

We believe that annotations can in general have multiple types; that is,
a single instance of an annotation can simultaneously belong in
several classes.

-Ralph

Received on Thursday, 12 October 2000 14:01:53 UTC