Towards Annotopia—Enabling the Semantic Interoperability of Web-Based Annotations

Jane Hunter,Anna Gerber

doi:10.3390/fi4030788

Abstract

This paper describes the results of a collaborative effort that has reconciled the Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) ontology and the Annotation Ontology (AO) to produce a merged data model [the Open Annotation (OA) data model] to describe Web-based annotations—and hence facilitate the discovery, sharing and re-use of such annotations. Using a number of case studies that include digital scholarly editing, 3D museum artifacts and sensor data streams, we evaluate the OA model’s capabilities. We also describe our implementation of an online annotation server that supports the storage, search and retrieval of OA-compliant annotations across multiple applications and disciplines. Finally we discuss outstanding problem issues associated with the OA ontology, and the impact that certain design decisions have had on the efficient storage, indexing, search and retrieval of complex structured annotations.

Highlights

Introduction and BackgroundAnnotating documents is a core and pervasive practice for scholars across both the humanities and sciences
Previous annotation data models, such as the Annotea ontology that underpins Annotation Ontology (AO) were designed with the assumption of a single target, so they provide no mechanism for associating an Annotea Context with a specific target
In this paper we firstly describe the Open Annotation (OA) model that has recently been developed through the W3C Open Annotation Community Group by aligning the Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) and AO data models

Summary

Introduction and Background

Annotating documents is a core and pervasive practice for scholars across both the humanities and sciences. The W3C Open Annotation Community Group was established in 2011 to specify an extensible, interoperable framework for representing annotations, by aligning the OAC and AO data models. Namespace (“oa:”) [10], the W3C Annotation Community Group are working on an Extension ontology (namespace “oax:”) [11] that defines additional sub-classes and properties that are specific to certain common use cases and content media types. These extensions include: oa:Annotation subClasses (e.g., oax:Bookmark, oax:Comment, oax:Description, oax:Highlight, oax:Question, oax:Reply, oax:Tag); annotation types (dctypes:Dataset; dctypes:Image; dctypes:MovingImage; dctypes:Sound; dctypes:Text); media-specific. We provide a discussion of some of the problematic and open issues associated with the OA model

Annotations for Electronic Scholarly Editions

Migrating Annotations across Multiple Representations of Museum Artefacts

Automatic Semantic Tagging of Species Accelerometry Data and Video Streams

Implementation

Discussion and Evaluation

Conclusions