Re: Annotea's context property

summary:
 - "dc:creator" can be anything
 - reconsidering the idea of context as a literal.

details:

dc:creator

As far as I can tell the protocol makes no formal requirement on the content
of dc:creator, and the Dublin Core doesn't either. So for interoperability
you should expect to get any kind of content, and return what you got. This
can be helpful.

For example I might want to claim that the creator of  document is
  <foaf:Person> <foaf:mbox> <mailto:charles@sidar.org> .
i.e. the person who has the email address charles@sidar.org, expressed in
a way that can be processed by RDF and matched less ambiguously than just a
literal. This is legal according to my reading of the schemas.

To return to context...

The protocol is written by several people, and I am not one of them. Jose,
who is, says that the context is meant to be a literal - this could be made
explicit in the schema as Reto pointed out.

It seems to me that there are some possible arguments for not forcing context
to be a literal, rather than simply correcting the schema to say explicitly
what the protocol authors said on this list.

One of the use cases for annotations is EARL. From my experience, it makes
sense to be able to make EARL statements about a part of a document - which
is like annotating a context. EARL may use an xpath to identify a context,
but this is not defined for HTML documents. Instead, it might be useful to
describe the context with a complex bit of RDF, for example identifying the
context as "an xpath for a document available by submitting an HTML document
to a web service at http://example.org/tidy-it". (For that matter I might
like to do this in general annotations).

cheers

chaals

On Thu, 6 Mar 2003, Brent Hendricks wrote:

>
>Reto Bachmann-Gmuer wrote:
[snip]
>> I'm wondering, why does zAnnot care about, isn't it a good idea for a
>> server to return what it gets. Does zAnnot allow the author attribute to
>> be both a Resource (VCARD or so) as well as a Literal, or does zAnnot
>> insist on getting what it expects?
>
>ZAnnot attempts to follow the Annotea spec as written.  There, creator
>appears as a literal.  I can try to be a little more flexible in what I
>accept, but I'm concerned about interoperability.  If each client is
>basically choosing what type of data to send for each field, how will
>they ever be compatible?
>
>--Brent
>

Received on Thursday, 6 March 2003 12:04:01 UTC