1. W3C Open Annotation Data Model:
achieving interoperability
Paolo Ciccarese, PhD
Co-chair of the W3C Open Annotation Community Group
Mass General Hospital Harvard Medical School
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Group
Open Annotation Community Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/communities/openannotation/
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
2. Acknowledgements
• Robert Sanderson (Co-chair), Herbert Van de
Sompeland all the members of the W3C Open
Annotation Community Group
• Annotation Ontology: Tim Clark, Marco
Ocana, Leyla Garcia Castro, Bob Morris, Paul
Morris, Phil Desenne, StianSoiland-Reyes…
• Open Annotation Collaboration: Tim Cole, Neil
Fraistat, Anna Gerber, Jane Hunter, Jim
Smith, Jacob Jett…
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
3. Annotation is emerging as…
• A uniform, pervasive method for describing…
bookmarking, integrating, connecting, sharing
… a variety of (digital) resources
• A starting point and not only an end point
• Valuable content.. sometimes even more
valuable than the annotated content
• Important search/discovery mechanism
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
4. … we commonly use annotation
• We annotate
prints, HTML and PDFs
• We bookmark/tag web
pages…
• … and publications
(citations/references)
• We comment on web
pages, blogs, forums and
emails
• youtube, vimeo, flickrslid
eshare,twitter…
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
5. Problem is…
• Most of applications make very hard to export
and aggregate our own annotation
• Applications have a life span and they can
disappear along with your annotation
• No application will cover all the annotation
related use cases
• We need to enable applications developers
and researchers
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
7. W3C Open Annotation
Community Group
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/
71 participants from around the world
6th of 110 community groups
Join Us!
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
8. Interoperability starts from people
• OA started with the reconciliation of
– Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC)
– Annotation Ontology (AO)
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
9. Annotation Ontology (AO)
• OWL vocabulary for representing and sharing
annotation of digital resources and their
fragments in RDF format
• Focus on biomedicine and sciences. But desire
to make the AO framework more broadly
usable.
Ciccarese et al, 2011
An open annotation ontology for science on web 3.0
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
10. Open Annotation Collaboration
• Focus on interoperability for annotations in
order to allow sharing of annotations across:
– Annotation clients;
– Content collections;
– Services that leverage annotations.
• Focus on annotation for scholarly purposes.
But desire to make the OAC framework more
broadly usable.
http://openannotation.org/
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
11. Open Annotation CG Mission
Interoperability between Annotation systems and
platforms:
…following the architecture of the Web
…reusing existing Web standards
…providing a single and coherent model
…preserving the original ‘meaning’
…orthogonal to the domain of interest
…without requiring adoption of specific platforms
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
12. What is annotation?
An Annotation is considered to be a set of connected
resources, typically including a body and target, where the
body is related to (often about) the target.
Users Annotate To:
…Provide an Aide-Memoire Highlighting, Bookmarking
…Share and Inform Commenting, Describing
…Improve Discovery Tagging, Linking
…Organize Resources Classifying, Identifying
…Interact with Others Questioning, Replying
…Create as well as Consume Editing, Moderating
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
13. Basic Data Model
0..* 1..*
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
14. Example: bookmarking
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
15. Example: commenting
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
16. Multiple Targets
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
17. Provenance (maps to PROV)
PROV-O: W3C Proposed Recommendation http://www.w3.org/TR/prov-o/
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
18. Further Specification of Resources
Specific Body and Specific Target resources identify the region of
interest, and/or the state of the resource.
Need to be able to describe the state of the resource, the segment of
interest, and potentially styling hints for how to render it.
We introduce:
State Describes how to retrieve representation
Selector Describes how to select segment
Style Describes how to render/process segment
Scope Describes context of the resource
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
19. Annotating text fragments
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
20. Text Quote Selectors
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
21. Fragment Selectors
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
22. SVG Selectors
SVG: W3C Recommendation http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
23. Media Fragments (and scope)
Media Fragments URI: W3C Recommendation http://www.w3.org/TR/media-frags/
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
24. And more selectors
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
25. And more…
• support for tagging and semantic tagging
• extending motivations
• organizing bodies and targets collections
• serialization in JSON-LD and other formats
• support for RDF graphs
• …
Join us and follow our mailing list:
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
26. Support for tagging
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
27. Support for tagging
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
29. W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
30. New specifications (Feb 8, 2013)
http://www.openannotation.org/spec/core/
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard
31. W3C Open Annotation
Community Group
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/
paolo.ciccarese@gmail.com
W3C Open Annotation Data Model Paolo Ciccarese
http://www.w3.org/community/openannotation/ Annotations@Harvard