Steel Wagstaff asks:
Immediate issue: we’ve got books on our dev server w/ annotations & want to move them intact to our production instance. The broader use case: I publish an open Pressbook & users make public comments on it. Someone else wants to clone the book including comments. How?
There are currently three URL-independent identifiers that can be used to coalesce annotations across instances of a web document published at different URLs. The first was the PDF fingerprint, the second was the DOI, and a third, introduced recently as part of Hypothesis’ EPUB support, uses Dublin Core metadata like so:
<meta name=”dc.identifier” content=”xchapter_001″>
<meta name=”dc.relation.ispartof” content=”org.example.hypothesis.demo.epub-samples.moby-dick-basic”>
If you dig into our EPUB.js and Readium examples, you’ll find those declarations are common to both instances of chapter 1 of Moby Dick. Here’s an annotation anchored to the opening line, Call me Ishmael. When the Hypothesis client loads, in a page served from either of the example URLs, it queries for two identifiers. One is the URL specific to each instance. The other is a URN formed from the common metadata, and it looks like this:
urn:x-dc:org.example.hypothesis.demo.epub-samples.moby-dick-basic/chapter_001
When you annotate either copy, you associate its URL with this Uniform Resource Name (URN). You can search for annotations using either of the URLs, or the just URN like so:
Although it sprang to life to support ebooks, I think this mechanism will prove more broadly useful. Unlike PDF fingerprints and DOIs, which typically identify whole works, it can be used to name chapters and sections. At a conference last year we spoke with OER (open educational resource) publishers, including Pressbooks, about ways to coalesce annotations across their platforms. I’m not sure this approach is the final solution, but it’s usable now, and I hope pioneers like Steel Wagstaff will try it out and help us think through the implications.
Thanks for this very helpful start, Jon. In some of our use cases, we’re thinking about syndicating annotations for derivative works based on openly licensed texts. Rather than suggesting that the derivative version is somehow interchangeable with (or a part of) the source, we’re looking at using the Schema.org ‘isBasedOn’ property in our metadata: http://bib.schema.org/isBasedOn. If we do that, would you recommend that we create an issue in the h GitHub repo to request adding support for this type of metadata, or how might we best proceed?
This is exactly the discussion I’d like to have with some folks in the OER world who are looking at the same issue, and with whom we’ve had some prior conversations. So, let’s convene something!