More about annotations

Readers make marks in books. You bookmark pages in your browser. You quote a passage of text and comment on it. IIIF provides the platform for allowing for all different kinds of scholarly annotation.

Annotations can be useful for:

• Research
• Teaching
• Machines
• Crowdsourcing
• Conservation

An annotation target is a URI pointing in whole or in part (fragment) to a resources like:

• web pages
• audio video
• images
• IIIF canvases

Annotation bodies, the content of the comment/annotation, can be:

• text
• images
• audio
• video
• URIs

Annotations are created for different reasons like:

• painting
• commenting
• bookmarking

Adapted from jronallo/iiif-workshop

Open Annotation vs. Web Annotation

The IIIF Presentation v2.x APIs use the Open Annotation Data Model for representing annotations. The examples in this workshop use this. However, in IIIF Presentation v3.0, the data model will be changed to use the W3C Web Annotation Data Model. While these data models are fairly similar, its worth calling out the change as syntax and usage will be different.