Addaci
commented
6 years ago Input from @rsimon, Technical Director of Pelagios & Lead Developer of Recogito [April 3rd 2018, 15.16]
Rainer Simon replied to the topic IIIF, Transkribus & Recogito annotation approaches/ecosystems in the forum Recogito Users forum
"Hi,
<I would find it useful to have a high level description of the relationship between IIIF, Transkribus, and Recogito annotation approaches>
There is no existing high level description I'm afraid ;-) be interested in a bigger picture of how Recogito can fit with Transkribus, myself, e.g., because that's entirely unexplored territory.
Some thoughts with regard to IIIF though:
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Recogito has been supporting for a while "import" of images served via the IIIF image API protocol, although it's been somewhat of a hidden feature. (Technically not an "import" of couse, since those images are served directly from their respective institutions' image servers.)
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I have recently (last week) extended Recogito to provide support for manifests conforming to (what I think is) the Presentation API v2. That means you can drop in the URL to a manifest for a particular item (e.g. a manuscript) and will get the images listed in Recogito, properly labeled and sorted etc. We'll see what additonal metadata makes sense to pull out from the manifests later, but for the time being that's all we really need.
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I've recently seen an example of a IIIF annotation list (which I think is an addition in Presentation API v3.0? But not sure. As a single developer, juggling a bunch of different user interests of which IIIF just one, it's hard to keep up with the huge & moving standard...) Anyways: adding "import" for such annotation lists looks pretty straightforward & is definitely on the list.
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Likewise, it should be pretty easy to expose/export annotations created in Recogito as such an annotation list, as one additional format among the several we support already.
That being said: Recogito's annotation model does provide more structure and possiblities as what I've seen in IIIF examples so far. My impression is that annotations in IIIF are often just a snippet of HTML. With regard to importing, Recogito would probably jsut treat that as a single textual comment, with no author attribution information.
Annotations created in Recogito, on the other hand, can be a series of comments (and replies), tags, transcriptions, URIs to place or person authority files; all individually stamped with information about what user created them, and when). Exporting those to a IIIF annotation list would likely have to end up being a lossy process, where IIIF annotations would be simplified versions of our internal originals, for the sake of compatibility.
We can (and do, for the JSON-LD export) make our annotations compliant to the Web Annotation data model. But as far as I'm aware there are few implementations that actually do handle structured annotations, originating from other systems, so it's not possible to set up a real world test case. Input and ideas around this are appreciated!
P.S.: the way our annotations are structured in Recogito is the result of working with scholarly users over the past two years. By now, I think Recogito has a lot to offer that's highly relevant in every scenario where annotation needs to go beyond just the basic case of highlighting a region and attaching some commentary. AFAIK it's not something that UV and Mirador offer out of the box. I regret that there has been very little interaction between us and them so far. Primarily, this is really due to lack of time on my end to "dance on all weddings at once", as we say in German. (I guess in English it's simply "juggling too many balls at once" ;-) I'd certainly love to see more engagement with the IIIF community, but it's currently restricted by the realities of available resources. (That doesn't mean that members from the Pelagios community can't step in, though! ;-)
glenrobson
rsimon
It would be useful to have a high level description of the relationship between IIIF, Transkribus, and Recogito annotation approaches. This will provide context for one strand of discussion at the Stadsarchief workshop on June 5th, 2018.