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

Thu Nov 22 09:30:23 UTC 2012

Hi Randall,

On 21.11.12 22:18, Randall Leeds wrote:
> (Side note, I'd love feedback about publishing annotator core and
> plugins as bower packages:
> https://github.com/okfn/annotator/issues/117#issuecomment-10096820)

Bower looks nice ans simple at a first glance. How would building the
final .min.js work? Can that be integrated with redo? (Figuring out how
to build took me longest ;-)

>> 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?
> 
> Absolutely. Extensible selectors is exactly where we need to go, IMO,
> for new media types as well as more robust text anchoring (issue
> #115).

Yes, we would also like to change the generator for xpaths in that vein
to produce paths that are anchored to the nearest ancestor with an
xml:id instead of the root.

> Maybe we should start collecting some proposals for addressing this.
> One might go like this: "Allow setupAnnotation to delegate to
> selectors registered on / triggered by a particular field, e.g.
> 'ranges'."

That seems like a clean and easy way.

Maybe the plugins could put a callback into a hash with the field name
as a key.

Or setupAnnotation could send the field name as an event.

> It looks like the yuma/annotorious work uses a "shape" field instead
> of "ranges" [0].

Yes, I am in contact with Rainer about this. I would like to use the
same field and format. Maybe we need to specify coordinate units.

> We could start collecting these on the wiki so that we might start to
> form a common set that we can all share for interoperability. In the
> future, we can reflect our our lazy consensus to the Open Annotation
> group to help inform a common set of candidate selectors for the
> extension document [1].

I am loosely following the openannotation mailing list. Discussions on
concrete use of Selectors have been few, so I think it would be great to
have real-world use cases.

Best
	Robert

> Rainer, would you please point me to any documentation you have of the
> format of the shape field?
> 
> [0] https://github.com/annotorious/annotorious/blob/master/src/okfn/okfn_image_plugin.js#L129
> [1] http://openannotation.org/spec/extension/#Selector