Integrating AnnoSys into your specimen data portal

Access to AnnoSys from your portal makes it possible to (1) annotate and to (2) show existing annotations for specimen data records. To this end, weblinks from the page displaying the individual specimen record to AnnoSys are incorporated into your website.

In the current (XML-based) system, the portal should provide a link called "annotate" or similar which redirects users to AnnoSys in order to create annotations based on the record data actually shown in your portal. Of course, to enable annotation, an access point for the record to be annotated has to be transmitted with the request. AnnoSys can then download the referred specimen data record. After successfully transferring the data, the user will be redirected to the AnnoSys Annotation Editor first and if they start editing an annotation to the AnnoSys user login/registration dialog subsequently to. At present, AnnoSys supports ABCD 2.06, ABCD 2.1 or SimpleDarwinCore in XML formats. If you already use a BioCASe provider to deliver ABCD data from your collection database, then this is sufficient, but you can also provide any other URL that provides the record in one of the supported formats, and AnnoSys will download the data from that URL.

In order to show existing annotations, you request AnnoSys to show them by querying the AnnoSys repository for the ID of the specimen. Currently, the triple ID in use in the GBIF and BioCASE networks is used to identify a specimen. An information request directed to AnnoSys for a certain triple ID will return a JSON response with:

hasAnnotation: true/false indicating if there are any annotations available size: number of currently available annotations annotations: a list of relevant annotation metadata you may want to show in your portal, such as
annotator (name of the annotator)time (creation time in ms since 01.01.1970)motivation (type) of the annotationrepositoryURI: link to the RDF-Data of the annotationrecordURIs: list of URIs to the original record data (XML) the annotation is based on

You can either directly link to the AnnoSys interface to display the existing annotation, using the repositoryURI and recordURIs element values from the JSON response, or you can display selected metadata about already available annotations directly in your portal.

For full documentation including examples see the AnnoSys wiki.