Aspiration to meet Web Annotation Protocol

[glenrobson]

Not sure when Ill get round to this but would be good to support:

http://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-protocol/

[rlskoeser]

Hi, @glenrobson. Could you elaborate a bit on what you had in mind here?

I have some specific questions, not sure how much it overlaps with what you were thinking about. The context is that I'm trying to see if I can get annotorious / annotorious seadragon to work with simple annotation server as a storage backend.

• how much effort would it take to get annotations out in the w3c model?
• similar, how much effort to support creating and updating annotations by posting them in w3c annotation format?
• any thoughts about supporting annotation collections?

[glenrobson]

Supporting Annotorious would be great! Regarding your questions:

• how much effort would it take to get annotations out in the w3c model?
• similar, how much effort to support creating and updating annotations by posting them in w3c annotation format?

I think both of these questions are related. @robcast did a cross walk between v2 annos and w3c annos here: https://github.com/ProjectMirador/mirador-annotations/blob/master/src/SimpleAnnotationServerV2Adapter.js so I think its possible. I think it would require quite a few changes in SAS to achieve in the Java code but it is something I'm looking at particularly as we would like to move to IIIF v3 in the IIIF training.

I've recently refactored the code to use the Annotation class and I'd have to think carefully how to make this support v3.

• any thoughts about supporting annotation collections?
  I haven't really thought about support for annotation collections to be honest but it would be great to hear your use cases.

[rlskoeser]

Thanks for the response. I was actually looking at that bit of mirador code as a reference! I guess I hadn't looked through it thoroughly enough (although I did notice that @robcast had authored it – hi, Robert!). It looks like it should work to adapt that for an Annotorious storage plugin in the short term. If and when you are able to support v3, then presumably the plugin code could be simplified.

@robcast I don't see a license on the mirador-annotations repo, do you know if it falls under the Apache 2 license for the main Mirador codebase? Can you think of any reason why I can't/shouldn't adapt this code ?

@glenrobson do you need to support both v2 and v3 annotations? That would certainly make it harder!

Regarding the annotation collections (and maybe also annotation pages) — I was reading about them on the W3C spec and wondered if it might help for a couple of my use cases. Maybe there are other ways to handle this

• bulk export of all annotations related to a single project (i.e., for regular backups to GitHub)
• ordered annotations within a particular document — I'm working on setting up annotation for transcription, so order within a document or on a page is pretty important! I don't know how annotations are ordered currently, or if order is guaranteed

[robcast]

@rlskoeser (👋 ) I assume that the mirador-annotations code is Apache 2.0 licensed (it has a license property in package.json but no further details ;-) Please feel free to reuse it. The Adapter only does a limited conversion of V3 to V2 sufficient for Mirador. If you have any questions about the code, let me know.

As to AnnotationCollections, I plan (for some time...) to write a IIIF cookbook recipe with some basic information in the hope to motivate users to standardize on a format and viewer developers to implement this format. So I would also be interested in your use-cases :-)

[rlskoeser]

Thanks, @robcast. I saw that the conversion looked like it was not exhaustive; makes sense to keep it minimal and specific to Mirador. I should be able to adapt your code to do something similar that will be good enough (for my needs, at least) with Annotorious (and I'll reach out if I have questions).

I'd be interested to discuss annotation collections at some point — maybe we could all chat about it on the IIIF slack sometime?

[rlskoeser]

Forgot to share my progress! I have the code from @robcast basically working with Annotorious & Simple Annotation Server; so far, it just needed a couple of minor tweaks to work with Annotorious.