RE: xlink & annotation

1,000 thanks. It all falls nicely into place now.


>At 12:54 AM 11/18/2001 +0100, Danny Ayers wrote:
>>Hi,
>>Can someone please tell me why the annotation initiative seems to have
>>skirted XLink and opted for RDF to supply link semantics?
>
>because there are much richer semantics that other applications
>of Annotea will eventually use.  The extensibility of RDF makes
>it far more straightforward to add properties refining your own
>semantics than the XLink role model permits.
>
>I agree with you that were we only interested in human navigation
>links then XLink would have been quite sufficient.  But our ambitions
>go well beyond the tiny bit of work you see in Amaya and Annotea
>right now.  And even with what we currently represent in Amaya
>annotations, we stress what the simpler XLink models express
>in their most convenient forms.
>
>You could certainly think of Annotea and its protocol as an example
>of what XLink calls an 'external link database'.
>
>Early on in our work we did a whiteboard model of how to express
>what we wanted for simple annotations in an 'extended XLink with
>locator elements'.  The model turned out to have similar, and in
>certain respects a little more, complexity as the plain RDF model
>we finally chose for Annotea.  (Note that other people's models
>for annotations -- such as the ILRT one -- have refinements over
>ours that are even harder to describe in XLink syntax.)  Our early
>modelling was the inverse of the exercise described by Ron Daniel
>in "Harvesting RDF Statements from XLinks" W3C Note 29 September 2000
>http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-xlink2rdf-20000929/
>though we did our modelling independently of Ron's work.
>
>An interesting exercise would be to repeat the inverse modelling
>using the structure in Ron Daniel's NOTE in a more careful
>manner.  I wouldd be very happy to review drafts of such work if
>someone picks up this exercise.
>
>>(I'm afraid the archive search is "Unable to contact target server
>>onatopp.w3.org:11000 after 3 tries.").
>
>We've had major hardware failures on that machine recently
>and as a result our system's group has raised the priority of
>a complete replacement for our site search facility.
>
>-Ralph

Received on Sunday, 18 November 2001 06:18:53 UTC