Annotations Research - bounswe/bounswe2022group7 GitHub Wiki

About the Web Annotation Data Model

Introduction

Annotating is the act of creating associations between distinct pieces of information. Comments about shared photos or videos, reviews of products, or even social network mentions of web resources could all be considered as annotations.

The Web Annotation Data Model provides framework for expressing annotations such that they can easily be shared between platforms, with sufficient richness of expression to satisfy complex requirements while remaining simple enough to also allow for the most common use cases, such as attaching a piece of text to a single web resource.

An annotation is considered to be a set of connected resources, mainly including a body and target.

Every Annotation itself is an object on the Web that can also be annotated, shared and stored separately from the content that is being annotated. The Body is the content that is "about" the Target. Annotations, Bodies and Targets may have relationships themselves, typically including creation and descriptive information.

Serialization of the Model

JSON-LD 1.1 is used for the serialization of the model. JSON-LD 1.1 is a JSON-based serialization for linked data.

A basic model example following this serialization can be seen below:

Some Web Annotation Principles

  • An Annotation is a rooted, directed graph that represents a relationship between resources.
  • There are two primary types of resource that participate in this relationship, Bodies and Targets.
  • Annotations have 0 or more Bodies.
  • Annotations have 1 or more Targets.
  • The content of the Body resources is related to the content of the Target resources.
  • Annotations, Bodies and Targets may have their own properties and relationships.

Possible Use Cases in Our Project

Clarifying Content on the Platform

Text Annotation

The text annotation can be used for commenting in our application. Also, we can have details about the textual body such as the language of the comment etc. In addition to that, a user should also be able to add textual annotations to the content on the platform.

A use case and an example is given below about this point:

Image Annotation

These pieces of information can be useful as to using external web resources:

Also, we can use typing of Body and Target that demonstrates the kind of the annotation that the user made. As written in the project description, the user shall be able to make both textual and image annotations.

Bookmarking Content

The annotation model that we shall use for the bookmarking function in our platform might be similar to the one that is shared in the example below:

References

This research report is highly dependent on the Web Annotation Data Model documentation of W3C.

Other resources that I am inspired by while writing this report include: