Use cases from the "Digital Publishing Annotation Use Cases" document

[iherman]

Here are some, possibly relevant, items from the Digital Publishing Annotation Use Cases document that are not currently in the EPUB Annotation UCS. Note that some use cases are noted as "particularly challenging to solve"; those have not been included. My impression that the other use cases are already represented, albeit in more succinct form, in our document.

In some items below, I have added my own comments in parentheses.

• §2.1 Annotations targeting the full publications. This has sub-issues:

  • Annotating the metadata of the publication, e.g., title, see § 2.1.1.
  • Annotation of the publication as a whole, e.g., a review of the publication, see §2.1.3 Structured review of the publication. (This could be considered as an annotation without target or, put it another way, the default target is the full publication.)

• More detailed requirement on the §2.1.7 Annotation Metadata. (At some point we probably have to define a minimal set of metadata that a single annotation may have, so listing it in the UCR might make sense.)

• §2.2.6 Annotating Alt Text of Embedded Resources (A bit similar to the metadata annotation case.)

• §2.2.7 Annotations comparing segments within a publication; essentially, an annotation having several targets ("locators" in our current terminology). This requirement is repeated in §2.3.7 Annotations has a choice of multiple, dependent bodies or targets, also introducing the possibility of multiple bodies.

• §2.3.1 Cross Format Annotation, i.e., a single annotation may have several "rendering" format: Markdown, PDF, and HTML. (I wonder whether this is not out of scope, and left to a RS.)

• §2.3.3 Maintaining annotation style and §2.3.4 Maintaining annotation layout: both are, essentially, to allow the end user to interactively control the annotation styling. (If we decide to use Markdown for the annotation bodies, then we can get that for free…)

• §2.5.2 Location of Annotations: in my interpretation, it is the need to have a "TOC"-like structure for annotations. (The term "location" in this item is not the same as what is being used in the current EPUB Annotation UCR.)

I am not claiming that we should necessarily add all these to our list; we may declare some, or all, of these out of scope for our work upfront. But they may deserve consideration.