Objectives: Provision of replicated, synchronised management of user annotations to items in the content repositories. Annotations can be comments, discussion threads, tutorials, reviews, reading lists, or other user contributed elements that can be attached to individual items in the collection.
The user interface (WP6) will support viewing of such content and the search engine (WP5) will support searching within it.
Annotations can themselves contain references to items and will be analysed for the association analyser toolset (WP8).
- Deliverable 9.1 – Annotation component design The document details the use cases and technical design for the build and integration for a component to provide annotations on items stored in the content repositories of the EuDML. It comprises:
An introduction to the high-level requirements for annotation within EuDML
An overview of the current technical architecture of the EuDML system, how the Annotation Component (AC) fits into this general architecture, along with a summary of research into other technologies which are being used which would be a consideration for the AC
A summary of the usage of annotations and user engagement features used by other websites
A list of use cases for annotations on EuDML followed by a clarification of scope based on the use cases
A proposed technical design for the AC comprising a SOAP service interface for creating/managing annotations and collections, and a Linked Data approach (with suggestions for an ontology for annotations)
Acceptance criteria for the final AC, detailing the points by which the component will be assessed to be completed.
- Deliverable 9.2 – Annotation component implementation The document surveys Task 9.1 “Identification and design”; updates to the design included the clarification of the Collection entity and the removal of tags (instead being replaced by Subjects under a defined classification scheme). This document additionally details the current system implementation and proposed demonstration as part of Task 9.2 “Initial implementation”.
- Deliverable 9.3 – Annotation component integration The document presents the current state of the Annotation Component integration into the main EuDML System. We give a brief description of every currently implemented use case together with its visualization.
- D9.4 – Annotation Component – Final Version This document presents the final state of the Annotation Component and its integration into the main EuDML system. The annotation functionality is now available at user level through the user interface, which is fully integrated into the template layer of the EuDML website that includes the nineteen use cases defined earlier in deliverable D9.1. The use cases are illustrated by the corresponding screenshots.
The Annotation Component provides also methods for handling annotations and lists via remote calls. In this mode, annotations and lists can only be retrieved (not added nor modified) and the Annotation Component provides only public annotations and lists. There are methods for specific retrieval (annotations by URL or target) as well as general list retrieval (annotations satisfying a SPARQL query). Methods for specific retrieval were made to satisfy the most frequent queries quickly and efficiently. Some of these methods are used by the embed code in widgets, however all methods return objects serialised via JSON which is a widely used format, both for widget style data-exchange using Javascript, and increasingly as a generally accepted format for consuming web services.
A number of widgets are available allowing annotation functionality to be shared on 3rd party websites which enrich their services due to the accessibility of lists within the EuDML system, providing more visibility to and usage of the EuDML lists, that are accessible to registered EuDML users. The widgets are implemented with Javascript, using HTML and iFrames with data exchanged by the EuDML website via JSON.
