[annotator-dev] Multiple Ranges

Wed Mar 6 16:40:45 UTC 2013

On 06.03.13 11:20, Suchitra Subramanian wrote:
> Hi - I am implementing saving annotations on a page to the database.
> 
>  I would like to know when an annotation would have multiple ranges.
> 
> w.r.t. the Annotation format specified in
> https://github.com/okfn/annotator/wiki/Annotation-format, even if i create
> an annotation on text spanning multiple paragraphs, the "ranges" list
> always has 1 entry.

I think it is not possible in the current Annotator frontend to select
more than one text span for an annotation. The same goes for our
digilib-annotator frontend for graphical annotations.

> If there is no possibility of ranges being multiple, I would design my
> database table structures accordingly.

I would think in the short term you could ignore multiple ranges but in
the longer term it may be used.

In principle it could make sense to attach an annotation to a
non-continuous range of text or image, e.g. a technical term consisting
of two words that are separated by other words.

Looking at the OAC-Ontology (http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/)
it is not entirely clear to me how to model multiple ranges. Multiple
Selectors in one annotation Target? Composite Targets? Which may or may
not be relevant to the JSON Annotation-Format.

Other opinions?

	Robert