[annotator-dev] NLP Interchange Format (NIF)

Wed May 9 12:29:20 UTC 2012

On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 8:10 PM, Sebastian Hellmann
<hellmann at informatik.uni-leipzig.de> wrote:
> Hi all,
> please have a short look at:
> http://svn.aksw.org/papers/2012/WWW_NIF/nif_public_draft2.pdf

Hi Sebastian,

I've had a brief look at this. I think you might want to look into the
work of the Open Annotation Collaboration
(http://www.openannotation.org/), who are trying to build a semantic
specification for annotations on the the web, and have just published
their first beta specification:

  http://www.openannotation.org/spec/beta/

> I had a look at the annotator code and it seems as if you are building your
> Annotations on XPATH. Is this correct?

That's correct. The means of identifying an annotation is currently
(effectively) a pair of XPointers: (uri, xpath, offset), but I should
stress that this will almost certainly become one of many different
kinds of annotations (including deep annotation of images/audio/video
content) supported by the Annotator.

> I think the least you should do is to provide an RDF
> Vocabulary for your annotations and a converter, that converts your JSON to
> RDF and vice versa.

I agree, and if you wish to contribute a converter for NIF, that would
be great to have. My efforts towards any kind of semantic annotation
endpoint, however, will almost certainly be focused on exposing
annotations according to the OAC spec referenced above, as this seems
to have developed a critical mass of support.

> Is the AnnotateIt tools based on sessions, such as Google Docs?

The issue of real-time/collaborative annotations has been discussed,
but we don't currently have any support for it. That said, users can
make their annotations editable by others, and each annotation does
have a permanent URI, e.g.

  http://annotateit.org/annotations/4kcArX26So2gcQ8ZHpyMqQ

Any thoughts on how best to implement real-time annotation are warmly
solicited on this mailing list (perhaps under a new thread).

Hope that answers your questions!

Regards,
Nick