Re: storing EARL in annotea

I too have been playing with posting EARL to the annotest server.  At its
core, it's just an RDF database, so it can accept any kind of RDF you give
it.  You don't have to wrap the EARL as an annotation at all - you can just
post it straight.  You'll get back an error about "no annotations found,"
but all the triples are now in the database and you can do algae queries to
retrieve them.  The RDF that is returned is re-generated from the triples,
so it's a bit uglier than the beautful EARL we're producing, but looking at
it has helped me think about the structure of EARL a bit more, and
hopefully it's still valid.  I'm not sure how Jim is posting to annotea,
but I'm guessing that since the reports he gets back haven't been
transformed the way I'm seeing mine be changed, he's at least including the
EARL in the body of an annotation.

You can't do general queries for content if the EARL is stored in the body
of an annotation.  This week at the technical plenary I spent a lot of time
bugging Eric Prud'hommeaux about various "features" of the annotea system.
According to him, if I post multiple EARL reports as straight EARL to
annotea and do a query, the returned result should be a combination of all
the RDF documents that satisfied my query.  I haven't got that to work
quite yet (I only get back the first document) but the combination could be
useful.

A few warnings from my experience playing with annotea:

1. The documentation at http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/User/Protocol.html
is wrong.  Annotest gives errors if you try to just post straight XML to
it.  Look at the source for
http://annotest.w3.org/annotations?explain=false for examples of how to
submit things - for example, to submit an annotation you have post your
content as w3c_annotate=<url-encoded rdf>.  Same idea for algae queries.

2. The annotea documentation also doesn't mention that you need to use
Authorization:Basic with username and password to post to the server.

3. Jim has already discovered this, but annotest has a bug when it names
other RDF namespaces, and EARL 0.95 properties come back as
<0.95:whatever>, which isn't legal and causes IE to complain and refuse to
show me anything.

I hope some of this was helpful.  If my sleep-deprived babbles on querying
weren't intelligible, I can attempt to explain myself better later.

Nadia

Received on Friday, 1 March 2002 06:16:08 UTC