Questions on the scope of the SimpleAnnotationServer

[ftheeten]

Dear projet developers,

This is not really a ticket but a technical question. We are currently responding to a call for projects published by the Belgian Agency for Science (BELSPO), that aims to link together the databases and web APIs of several Belgian museums active in the fields of natural sciences and humanities. Two of the aims of this project would be to add a semantic web API on top of existing databases, and to install an annotation server that would be made available to the public.
The IIIF SimpleAnnotationServer looks very interesting for these two tasks, and we had two questions on its scope :
-is it possible to use it also for other kinds of content than images (e.g. : sound archives, all-text database entries published in HTML, etc…) ?
-is it possible to use it with a triple store as Jena as backend ? Or to use the same Lucene-based backend (like ElasticSearch) as backend both for a Jena triple store and the SAS ?

Best regards,

[glenrobson]

Hi,

Apologies for the long delay in getting back to you and thank you for your interest. Regarding your two questions:

-is it possible to use it also for other kinds of content than images (e.g. : sound archives, all-text database entries published in HTML, etc…) ?

I'm afraid SAS is pretty closely tied to IIIF Images at the moment and I think the annotations would fail to save if they pointed to a sound file or HTML file.

-is it possible to use it with a triple store as Jena as backend ? Or to use the same Lucene-based backend (like ElasticSearch) as backend both for a Jena triple store and the SAS ?

Yes you can use Jena as a backend and it is the default backend unless you switch it to something else. Unfortunately you can only have one backend so its either Jena, ElasticSearch or SOLR.