Re: Annotea Features and EARL

Hello Leonard,

Thanks for your message. First, a word of clarification. Annotea is
a model that provides an RDF annotation schema and a protocol. When using
annotations in Amaya, you're actually using an instance of an Annotea
client (built-in into Amaya). We now have another client that uses javascript
and attaches to your client as a bookmarklet. As our protocol and model
are open, other clients could be written.

On Mon, Apr 09, 2001 at 11:44:36AM -0400, Leonard R. Kasday wrote:
> As some of you know, we in the Web Accessibility Initiatiatve Evaluation 
> and Repair (ER) Group have been working on a language, EARL [1] that 
> describes accessibility of web sites to people with disabilities.  The best 
> way to implement EARL may well be as an application of Annotea.  Would you 
> tell us your thoughts on the following features?  (rather than cross 
> posting, I figure it's best to keep them on the Annotea list.  I'll put a 
> pointer to this discussion on the ER list),
> 
> 
> 1. How does or will Annotea deal with documents that change?  For example, 
> if a part of a document changes, comments regarding other parts of the 
> document may still be valid, and we'd want those comments to stay useful.

We use XPointer to attach annotations to documents. The more robust the 
XPointer is, the less dependent the annotation will be of document changes.
If you use ID attributes, the annotation will start from that attribute.
Ideally, a combination of both ID attributes and DIV elements can help you
have better XPointers. The point is that this has to be planned from the
moment you make a document. A slightly deeper description of this, together
with an example is given in the Amaya/Help/Annotations page.

> 2. Can there be annotation of annotations?

The Annotea model allows it. However, in the last released version of Amaya,
it's not possible to do so. We're currently working on adding this feature,
as well as the possibility to reply to annotations and viewing all those
replies in a thread view. We plan to demo this at WWW10 DevDay.

> 3. Will there be structured annotations?  In other words, in addition to 
> free form comments, comments that involve new machine readable statements.

We haven't yet discussed this aspect in the Annotea team. You should
distinguish between reading, parsing, and editing that information. Mixing
EARL RDF statements with the Annotea statements is no problem. XML and NS
allows to do that. From the user point of view, it's completely transparent
if a user or, say, an EARL process generates an annotation. Once it is stored
in a database (or in a file), we can browse it as any other annotation.
If you want the user to be able to understand the EARL RDF statements, your
application must be able to understand them or at least show them. Today,
it's not possible to show those extra statements with Amaya.

I don't know how you would like to add those EARL statements to the 
annotations. It could be done either as the body of the annotation (pointing
to the EARL statemets), embeeded in the annotation structure, or as a link to
some other resource, referenced from the annotation structure.

> 4. Accessibility of Amaya to people with disabilities is improving but 
> there still seem to be some remaining problems, like need to use a 
> mouse.  Will annotea be accessible to people with disabilities, per the wai 
> user agent guidelines [2]

I think you want to mean "will the Amaya implementation of Annotea be more
accesible...". The answer is yes. For the moment, we have been building
the infrastructure, but little by little we hope to make it more WAI
friendly.

Thanks again for your questions.

-jose

Received on Tuesday, 10 April 2001 07:17:05 UTC