[Tei-council] Annotations and impasses

16 Aug 2020

      Hi All,

Since we essentially have today to make the go/no-go decision for getting
Annotations into this release. We seem to be deadlocked in a couple of
ways, and I would like to see if we can un-jam things.

Syd and I are arguing over whether annotations should look like:
  <annotation xml:id="anno9" target="http://example.org/image1
http://example.org/image2">
    <respStmt xml:id="HAC">
      <resp>creator</resp>
      <persName>Hugh Cayless</persName>
    </respStmt>
    <ptr target="http://example.org/description1"/>
    <note>tag1</note>
  </annotation>

or

<annotation xml:id="anno9" target="http://example.org/image1
http://example.org/image2">
    <annMeta>
      <respStmt xml:id="SB">
        <resp>creator</resp>
        <persName>Syd Bauman</persName>
      </respStmt>
    </annMeta>
    <annBody>
      <ptr target="http://example.org/description1"/>
      <note>tag1</note>
    </annBody>
  </annotation>

Syd's argument (and you should correct me if I'm misrepresenting your
opinion, Syd) is that it's cleaner to partition things this way and we
might want in the future to say virtually any TEI element could be an
annotation body.

My counter to this is that we set out here to implement the Web Annotation
Data Model (or parts of it at least) in TEI, and that WADM doesn't have
extra containers for annotation metadata or bodies. Further, WADM doesn't
do specialized body types. They have text and they have URIs.

I'm certainly in favor of adding useful features to TEI annotations, but if
we want to do that in the next round of work on annotations, we'll have to
do it by adding new TEI functionality (probably via new elements), and I
don't think partitioning the content of annotation will buy us anything. It
might make it worse, because the extra-sparkly new TEI functionality won't
be compatible with WADM:body and therefore probably shouldn't go in an
<annBody> element.

To compound this, Laurent seems to say that WADM was only ever meant to be
an inspiration and actual interoperability with Web Annotation wasn't a
goal they had in mind in requesting this feature. I'm just going to go cry
for a bit...excuse me.

Ok. I will sum up: I would really like to have WADM compatibility this year
because I have things I want to do with it. My proposal is that we proceed
with WADM-compatible annotations and then begin work on more powerful TEI
annotations. I would like to keep the content model of <annotation> as
simple and as close to WADM as possible, but I won't pout if I'm voted down
on that. What do you all think?

Hugh