[annotator-dev] Request for discussion: non-text annotations?

Wed Nov 21 15:12:14 UTC 2012

Hi Annotator-devs,

while building image-annotation support for the digilib viewer I came
across the issue of integrating annotations with a different format of
"the annotated thing" into the Annotator code. I found that

a) I really like the Anotator UI and code with its plugins for loading,
displaying and editing the annotations

but

b) there are some hard-wired assumptions about the existence and
structure of a "range" in annotator.coffee that I had to monkey-patch in
my DigilibIntegration plugin
<https://github.com/robcast/annotator/blob/master/src/plugin/digilibintegrator.coffee>

Currently I put the coordinates of the annotated region of the image in
an separate "areas" list analog to "ranges" like this:

"areas":[{
  "height":"0.0170",
  "width":"0.3291",
  "y":"0.5557",
  "x":"0.6938"}
]

The coordinates are decimal fractions [0..1] of the image width and
height, independent of the current image size.

Currently I switch on the existence of the "areas" list in my code.

Is it a good idea to have a separate property or should the image
coordinates also go in "ranges"?

It would be even better if the Annotator code would be able to switch on
the fly between different implementations of "ranges", maybe even as
plugins.

What do you think?

	Robert

-- 
Dr. Robert Casties -- Information Technology Group
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Boltzmannstr. 22, D-14195 Berlin
Tel: +49/30/22667-342 Fax: -299