The Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) Model Bernhard Haslhofer∗, Rainer Simony, Robert Sandersonz and Herbert van de Sompelz ∗Cornell Information Science, Ithaca, USA [email protected] yAustrian Institute of Technology, Vienna, Austria [email protected] zLos Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, USA frsanderson,[email protected] Abstract—Annotations allow users to associate additional in- Twitter tweets as annotations on Web resources. Therefore, in a formation with existing resources. Using proprietary and closed generic and Web-centric conception, we regard an annotation systems on the Web, users are already able to annotate mul- as association created between one body resource and other timedia resources such as images, audio and video. So far, however, this information is almost always kept locked up and target resources, where the body must be somehow about the inaccessible to the Web of Data. We believe that an important target. step to take is the integration of multimedia annotations and the Annotea [3] already defines a specification for publishing Linked Data principles. This should allow clients to easily publish annotations but has several shortcomings: (i) it was designed and consume, thus exchange annotations about resources via for the annotation of Web pages and provides only limited common Web standards. We first present the current status of the Open Annotation Collaboration, an international initiative that means to address segments in multimedia objects, (ii) if clients is currently working on annotation interoperability specifications want to access annotations they need to be aware of the based on best practices from the Linked Data effort. Then we Annotea-specific protocol, and (iii) Annotea annotations do present two use cases and early prototypes that make use of not take into account that Web resources are very likely to the proposed annotation model and present lessons learned and have different states over time. discuss yet open technical issues. Throughout the years several Annotea extensions have been developed to deal with these and other shortcomings: Koivun- I. INTRODUCTION nen [4] introduced additional types of annotations, such as Large scale media portals such as Youtube and Flickr allow Bookmark and Topic. Schroeter and Hunter [5] proposed to users to attach information to multimedia objects by means of express segments in media-objects by using context resources annotations. Web portals hosting multi-lingual collections of in combination with formalized or standardized descriptions to millions of digitized items such as Europeana are currently represent the context, such as SVG or complex datatypes taken investigating how to integrate the knowledge of end users from the MPEG-7 standard. Based on that work, Haslhofer et with existing digital curation processes. Annotations are also al. [6] introduce the notion of annotation profiles as containers becoming an increasingly important component in the cyber- for content- and annotation-type specific Annotea extensions infrastructure of many scholarly disciplines. and suggested that annotations should be dereferencable re- A Web-based annotation model should fulfill several re- sources on the Web, which follow the Linked Data principles. quirements. In the age of video blogging and real-time sharing However, these extensions were developed separate from each of geo-located images, the notion of solely textual annotations other and inherit the above-mentioned Annotea shortcomings. has become obsolete. Therefore, multimedia Web resources In this paper, we describe how the Open Annotations arXiv:1106.5178v1 [cs.DL] 25 Jun 2011 should be annotatable and also be able to be annotated onto Collaboration (OAC), an effort aimed at establishing anno- other resources. Users often discuss multiple segments of a tation interoperability, tackles these issues. We describe two resource, or multiple resources, in a single annotation and annotation use cases — image and historic map annotation – thus the model should support multiple targets. An annotation for which we have implemented the OAC model and report framework should also follow the Linked Open Data guide- on lessons learned and open issues. We also briefly summarize lines to promote annotation sharing between systems. In order related work in this area and give outlook on our future work. to avoid inaccurate or incorrect annotations, it must take the ephemeral nature of Web resources into account. II. THE OPEN ANNOTATION COLLABORATION Annotations on the Web have many facets: a simple example The Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC) is an inter- could be a textual note or a tag (cf., [1]) annotating an image or national group with the aim of providing a Web-centric, video. Things become more complex when a particular para- interoperable annotation environment that facilitates cross- graph in an HTML document annotates a segment (cf., [2]) boundary annotations, allowing multiple servers, clients and in an online video or when someone draws polygon shapes overlay services to create, discover and make use of the on tiled high-resolution image sets. If we further extend the valuable information contained in annotations. To this end, annotation concept, we could easily regard a large portion of a Linked Data based data model has been adopted. A. Open Annotation Data Model string The OAC data model tries to pull together various exten- dcterms:creator sions of Annotea into a cohesive whole. The Web architecture foaf:name dcterms:created and Linked Data guidelines are foundational principles, result- U-1 ing in a specification that can be applied to annotate any set foaf:mbox datetime of Web resources. At the time of this writing, the specifica- A-1 tion, which is available at http://www.openannotation.org/spec/ alpha3/, is still under development. Following its predecessors, string oac:hasBody oac:hasTarget the OAC model, shown in Figure 1, has three primary classes of resources. In all cases below, the oac namespace prefix CT-1 expands to http://www.openannotation.org/ns/. B-1 • The oac:Body of the annotation (node B-1). This resource is the comment, metadata or other information oac:constrainedBy oac:constrains cnt:characterEncoding that is created about another resource. The Body can cnt:chars be any Web resource, of any media format, available at C-1 T-1 string string any URI. The model allows for exactly one Body per Annotation. • The oac:Target of the annotation (node T-1). This is Fig. 1. OAC Baseline Data Model. the resource that the Body is about. Like the Body, it can be any URI identified resource. The model allows for one or more Targets per Annotation. as it was deemed artificial, and the complexities regarding • The oac:Annotation (node A-1). This resource handling the difference between information resource and non- stands for a document identified by an HTTP URI that information resource at the protocol level were considered a describes at least the Body and Target resources involved hindrance to potential adoption. in the annotation as well as any additional properties C. Addressing Media Segments and relationships (e.g., dcterms:creator). Dereferencing an annotation’s HTTP URI returns a serialization in a Many annotations concern parts, or segments, of resources permissible RDF format. rather than the entirety of the resource. While simple segments If the Body of an annotation is identified by a dereferencable of resources can be identified and referenced directly using the HTTP URI, as it is the case in Twitter, various blogging emerging W3C Media Fragment specification [9] or media- platforms, or Google Docs, it can easily be referenced from type-specific fragment identifiers as defined in RFCs, there an annotation. If a client cannot create URIs for an annotation are many use cases for segments that currently cannot be Body, for instance because it is an offline client, they can identified using this proposal. One example is the annotation assign a unique non-resolvable URI (called a URN) as the of historic maps, where users need to draw polygon shapes identifier for the Body node. This approach can still be around the geographic areas they want to address with their reconciled with the Linked Data principles as servers that notes. Sanderson et al. [10] describe another use case where publish such annotations can assign HTTP URIs they control annotators express the relationships between images, texts and to the Bodies, and express equivalence between the HTTP URI other resources in medieval manuscripts by means of line and the URN. segments. For these and other use cases, which require the The OAC model also allows to include textual information expression of complex media segment information, the current directly in the annotation document by adding the repre- W3C Media Fragments specification is insufficient. sentation of a resource as plain text to the Body via the For this reason, OAC introduces the so-called cnt:chars property and defining the character encoding oac:ConstraintTarget node (CT-1), which constrains using cnt:characterEncoding [7]. the annotation target to a specific segment that is further described by an oac:Constraint (C-1) node. The B. OAC and Linked Data description of the constraint depends on the application Several Linked Data principles have influenced the approach scenario and on the (media) type of the annotated target taken by Open Annotation Collaboration. The promotion of resource. For example, an SVG path could be used to describe a publish/discover approach for handling Annotations as op- a region within an image. posed to the protocol-oriented approach taken by Annotea stands out. But also the emphasis on the use (wherever D. Robust Annotations in Time possible) of HTTP URIs for resources involved in Annotations It must be stressed that different agents may create the reflects a Linked Data philosophy. Earlier versions of the Annotation, Body and Target at different times. For example, data model considered an Annotation to be an OAI-ORE Alice might create an annotation saying that Bob’s YouTube Aggregation [8] and hence a conceptual non-information re- video annotates Carol’s Flickr photo.