Standards: Three Recommendations From W3C Working Group to Enable Annotations on the Web

From W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) : 

The Web Annotation Working Group has just published a Recommendation for Web Annotation in the form three documents:

• Web Annotation Data Model—specification describes a structured model and format, in JSON, to enable annotations to be shared and reused across different hardware and software platforms. Common use cases can be modeled in a manner that is simple and convenient, while at the same time enabling more complex requirements, including linking arbitrary content to a particular data point or to segments of timed multimedia resources.

• Web Annotation Vocabulary—specifies the set of RDF classes, predicates and named entities that are used by the Web Annotation Data Model. It also lists recommended terms from other ontologies that are used in the model, and provides the JSON-LD Context and profile definitions needed to use the Web Annotation JSON serialization in a Linked Data context.

• Web Annotation Protocol—describes the transport mechanisms for creating and managing annotations in a method that is consistent with the Web Architecture and REST best practices.

The group has also produced two additional Working Group Notes:

• Embedding Web Annotations in HTML—describes and illustrates potential approaches for including annotations within HTML documents. Examples also are included illustrating the use within an HTML document of annotation Selectors as fragment identifiers

• Selectors and States—selecting part of a resource on the Web is an ubiquitous action. This document does not define any new approach to selection; instead, it relies on the formal specification and the semantics in the Web Annotation Data Model. The current document only “extracts” Selectors and States from that data model; by doing so, it makes their usage easier for applications developers whose concerns are not related to annotations.

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