[annotator-dev] Open Annotation support in Annotator

Wed Oct 1 18:07:58 UTC 2014

Dear all,

Earlier today a group of us had a short call to discuss the development
of better native support for Open Annotation[1] in Annotator. This email
is an attempt to summarise that call and provide some pointers to people
who are going to be working on this.

Without further ado, here are the key requirements for better OA support
in Annotator:

1. Devise an OA-compatible serialisation (AKA "wire format") -- most
work here seems to be leaning towards a JSON-LD-ification of
oa:Annotation.

2. Modify Annotator so that its internal model of annotations is
consistent with the OA data model. In particular, this means support for
multiple (typed) selectors and we may need to consider annotations with
multiple bodies and targets (as allowed by the OA spec).

3. Implement (probably in annotator-store[2]) an HTTP API with
functionality at least equivalent to the existing API, with support for
reading from and writing to the OA serialisation devised in 1.

4. Implement a storage component[3] in Annotator which talks to this OA
storage API.

5. Add support to Annotator for adding TextQuoteSelector[4] to
annotations. This doesn't have to include using this selector to
reanchor annotations, although obviously that would be nice to have
soon.

---

If anyone thinks I've left anything essential out, please reply on-list.

Notably, Gerben has already made a start towards 1 and 3 here:

    https://github.com/openannotation/annotator-store/pull/83
    https://github.com/openannotation/annotator-store/pull/90

If we could bring any further discussion of the serialisation onto this
list, that would probably make it easier to track the discussion.

I'll also send round some links a little later with a suggestion of
where and how we would get started on 2, 4, and 5.

Best,
Nick

[1]: http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/
[2]: https://github.com/openannotation/annotator-store/
[3]:
https://github.com/openannotation/annotator/blob/6581f25/src/storage.coffee
[4]:
http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/specific.html#TextQuoteSelector