Getting Earl in Annotea.

Hi.

I've now added partial support of EARL and Annotea into Snufkin (
http://jibbering.com/snufkin/ ) The version is currently not linked from
that page as it's neither stable or  particularly useful, but if you do
wish to look at it http://jibbering.com/snufkin/snufkin.0.22.wsf is the
file you need.    Currently you can only add Earl created elsewhere, when
on the page you wish to annotate enter "snufkin:annotateearl" and add your
earl to the textbox.  "snufkin:annotations" will retrieve any annotations
on the page, if they are returned as text/html they're presented in the
page, if it's "application/rdf?xml" * then it will be passed to my RDF
parser which currently displays a basic EARL "query" (similar to
http://jibbering.com/earl/rdfquery4.html )  anything else you're just
giving a link to.

Firstly a question for the Annotea folks:

It seems to me that there's no capability for using Algae to ask for only
annotations of the application/rdf+xml, it not being returned, it only
being available from actually requesting the resource. Is there actually
any way of  constructing such a query?

My main concern is how useful this is. Since the EARL is in the body of
the annotation, the annotation server can't be queried about the EARL, so
whatever processing would need to be done on the client, having got all
annotations - this may be expensive if you're only interested in certain
types of reports.  I'm a hacker of things so I'm not confident in RDF but
there seems to be two solutions - extend the Annotation RDF to include the
EARL not in the body so the Server can be queried over it, or use a
specific EARL database instead of the Annotea one.

A specific EARL database also has the advantage of not polluting
annotations from the other clients none of which do anything with EARL,
that is what seems sensible to me - but I'm sure other more knowledgeable
folks will know better.

Now for the EARL people - what should I do with the EARL I get ?  My
previous thoughts on how an EARL database could be used are already
available at http://jibbering.com/earl/ - should I do the same now with
the Annotea one or are there other ideas?  I think if it was to be used
properly it would really need it's own server rather than using the
annotest server.

The other issue is handling EARL threading, I don't believe the Annotea
annotation of annotations method is applicable with the current model, as
the RDF  parser never sees the Annotea together with the EARL.

Cheers,

Jim.

* ? is any character this is due to a minor bug in annotea I reported to
Eric Prud'hommeaux in IRC.

Received on Friday, 1 February 2002 18:49:55 UTC