Annotation feature

Design: Annotation feature

Annotation feature

Objective

This feature intend to associate metadata to a container. Metadata could be : type of annotation (synthax fault, spelling fault, disagreement, agreement), rate ...

Ideally implementation should not be restrictive concerning metadata character.

I mean it will be great if user could define himself a value and the concept associated to this value.

What is a container ?

A container is an abstract object that modelise data. It could be a mouse selection, a section , a entire page ...

Use cases

Steven wrote a document about social organisation of ants.

Randal explain his disagreement to a sentence and rate it, he also underline a synthax/spelling fault on some sentences.

After correcting synthax, Steven decides to annotate Randal disagreement annotation with an annotation which present the document url which validate his sentence (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant in this case).

Conscious of the fact that it could be extremely powerfull to create a page that list all annotations presenting sources, he added the source information using two textfields, the first filed with the word "source", the second with the url itself.

State of the art on annotation

Design

Data model

I think Annotation Class could extend Comment Class. Annotation class will get access to a Map in order to inform the system that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant is a source or that 7 is a rate. Text will be stored using super class functionalities.

Container

This interface already exist in Comment plugin. It appears relevant to add a method that indicate if data contained by a container has been modified since first annotation. So she will impose implementation of :

• boolean isContentModified ()

SelectionContainer

This interface modelise a container defined by selecting a sequence of characters. So she will impose implementation of :

• long getOffset ()
• long getLength ()