If we are chasing WADM compatibility, I prefer the second (i.e. a tag to group for Body) for clarity and because I think we will regret any other choice later — if it turns out that there could ever be a tag that could be both in body and in ‘metadata’.  It also makes parsing for export simpler.

If we are not absolutely chasing WADM compatibility, then I prefer the first option. 

N
 

On 16 Aug 2020, at 16:27, Hugh Cayless <philomousos@gmail.com> wrote:

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


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