Technical Standards / System Design Part 2: Looking Forwards to Phase 3

The current prototype Clipper application is built using these open Web standards

• HTML5
  • http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/
• HTML5 video: no particular format is specified see this link at W3C and the browser support table at this wikipedia article
• JavaScript
  • http://www.ecma-international.org
• CSS
  • http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/
• Json
  • http://json.org

Moving forwards in phase 3 we envisage using / investigating these standards

• JSON-LD
  •  http://json-ld.org/
  • JSON-LD W3C spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld/
• W3C Annotation Data model
  • http://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/
• The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF)
  • http://iiif.io
• DOI: Digital Object Identifier System
  • https://www.doi.org/
• ORCID
  •  http://orcid.org
• OAI-PMH
  • https://www.openarchives.org/pmh/

Our aim from the beginning has been to create a toolkit that has little or no dependency on any proprietary and ‘closed’ technology or standards. Choosing the above standards was a good start. Moving forwards we shall need to create a more detailed data model. We had been aware of the W3C Annotation Data model: http://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-model/ and the W3C web annotation working group http://www.w3.org/annotation/.

From a research point of view the following 3 standards could provide the vital ‘glue’ to bind a Clipper installation or service into the global digital research ecosystem

1. DOI: Digital Object Identifier System: In our discussions at the Roslin Institute we have identified the possible use of DOI’s to identify Cliplists, clips and annotations as well as the audio-visual resources they are linked to
2. ORCID: Provides a way of linking annotations etc. to individual researchers
3. OAI-PMH; Provides a useful way of sharing Cliplist information between repositories

As a result of our community engagement activities we have been fortunate in encountering Tom Crane and the Digirati company and in the ensuing discussions Tom has been suggesting that that these existing and emerging standards will be really worth exploring in Phase 3 and we think they look really promising:

• JSON-LD: http://json-ld.org/
• JSON-LD W3C spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld/
• The International Image Interoperability Framework http://iiif.io (IIIF)

Tom has pointed out that the IIIF Presentation API – http://iiif.io/api/presentation/2.1/ with its concept of an IIIF manifest is close to our idea of the project being the container for Cliplists etc. He has also suggested that the IIIF Shared Canvas: http://iiif.io/model/shared-canvas/1.0/index.html concept can be extended to time based media. With some time-based media vocabulary the IIIF work might be just what we need in Clipper. Tom is coming to the OU this Friday (27/11/15) to present the work of the IIIF and we hope to discuss this further with him then and make plans for phase 3.