Cross-domain infrastructure for creating and maintaining WADM annotations against IIIF resources.

Description

Abstract (English)

The IIIF consortium has established widespread access to visual data resources across the spectrum of scientific domains—from ancient manuscripts to dataset visualisations. However, while standards are available for representing annotations against this material (W3C’s Web Annotation Data Model – WADM), the deployment of practical infrastructure for creating annotation data at scale has been constrained by challenges integrating annotation workflows with existing institutional ecosystems. Moreover, the stand-off nature of annotation data makes it vulnerable when infrastructures evolve: technologies are replaced and annotation connections are lost. Making research investments using annotation into primary, discoverable and citable data resources in their own right, and realising the potential for long-term enrichment of FAIR data, is therefore becoming a priority.

The growing adoption of Open Repository strategies, and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) platforms having native IIIF support, in particular, provides a model for packaging annotation technologies into maintainable services. Repositories protect connections between annotation data and the resources they target, making investment in enrichment sustainable as well as efficient to discover and reuse by global communities. This approach, using ORCID and Research Organisation Registry (ROR) identifiers for attribution, creates a new foundation for increasingly sophisticated analyses using emerging AI/ML technologies.

In the proposed talk we will present recent projects online, from both the humanities and life sciences, which use common plug-in annotation services to create and maintain more than 2 million WADM annotations. Case studies, including IIIF resources at the University of Basel, Bodleian Libraries, British Library and Bibliothèque nationale de France, will demonstrate humanities applications of both manual and machine-generated annotation, as well as adoption in taught courses and PhD research activities.

During 2024 IIIF and WADM functionality was implemented for biodiversity applications by the European Commission's Zenodo research data repository, which is based on the InvenioRDM Open Repository software platform. Accordingly, Zenodo now provides a IIIF previewer and supports an 'Annotation Collection' data type and 'Annotated By' contributor role. Launched in August 2024 at the Disentis Biodiversity Symposium, this functionality will also be employed on Oxford's Digital Scholarship masters program in February and in April at Cambridge's Digital Heritage School. The proposing authors, who led this development, will introduce Zenodo IIIF and WADM services for Humanities applications to the IIIF community and demonstrate creation of Zenodo records which display WADM annotation collections within the public repository interface.