[annotator-dev] Annotator and yuma-js media annotation toolkit?

[Randall Leeds]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 11:00 AM, Simon Rainer <Rainer.Simon at ait.ac.at> wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
>
> that sounds great! I'll stay tuned.
>
> <I wonder what more specifics you have in mind for interoperability.>
>
> Still need to dive into the details of Annotator to be able to tell that, I guess. But the main thing that occured to me is that Yuma (=working title for our tool) might be able to fill a niche where only parts of content embedded in a Web page should be annotated; in particular when it's about more "exotic" media types. (We already have support for maps, zoomable images, and audio/video is in preparation.)

I looked at the Yuma demos and it's great. One thing about the current
Annotator storage is that it extracts the text under the selected area
and uses native selection I think, whereas Yuma uses the mouse events
to drag a box over the page. Is there any reason why we couldn't use
cancellation of mouse events to drag a custom selection overlay over
the page? Then we could look at elementFromPoint() of the top-left and
bottom-right points in this rectangle and do a search for the least
common ancestor DOM element. Anyway, alternative selection behaviours
and selection of rich media is a topic that interests me.

>
> Also, I thought there might be a chance to join forces somehow regarding server-side annotation storage. Our goal was always to make it easy for people to set up their own storage server, integrated with their own environment, login infrastructure, etc. At the same time, we've also been having the vision of a central hosting service for people who can't or don't want to set up their own solution (or who'd rather participate in a larger "social annotation network"). While I feel there are a few differences in how we approach things, we seem to share the fundamental ideas.
>

I'm working on a new store right now. The annotator store plugin today
is JSON and the reference implementation is CouchDB + Werkzeug.
However, the data model I'm aiming to work with is richer than the one
used by the store plugin today. I'm tempted to go down the JSON-LD
route, which seems to be gaining momentum, and exploring the current
work on JSON-LD <-> RDFa conversions that have good fidelity. I also
want to wrap up an out-of-the-box solution that provides a basic
annotation server. The vision (tentative) is that clients that wish to
can consume the JSON directly, but CouchDB can render templates to
generate RDFa for search engines and dumb clients. Even if it doesn't
have advanced directory capabilities built-in it might IMO provide a
great solution for personally hosting annotations if I can make this a
pure CouchApp.

> But there are certainly other aspects I haven't thought about yet. Maybe we can even identify some low-hanging fruit for short-term cooperation, who knows. But in any case: it's always good to coordinate and join forces, so I'm happy get into discussion! :-)

That's the first I've chimed in on this list. I hope I'm not hijacking
the thread. Looking forward to playing with all this stuff.

-Randall