As with any standards committee or best practices group, there is a subgroup tasked with providing examples for the internal community as well as external implementers. For IIIF, this group is the Cookbook group. Examples exist in the public Cookbook that properly format data assertions and combine them with resources in order to enhance those resources. […]
Category: development
Maps and Humanities
It should not be a surprise that data describing humanity depends heavily on the dimensions of time and space. How else can data representing human interaction, error, rectification, discovery, or adventure exist without these dimensions? The human construct of reality stands on concepts that give bounds to infinity. Time and space afford humans the concepts of […]
Structural REform

The world of annotations is one of unstructured targeting. There is an existing piece of data somewhere in the world and an annotation targets it. At a higher level we work with data objects called Manifest. The manifests we work with follow the construct created by the IIIF frame work (https://iiif.io/api/presentation/2.1/#manifest). An important attribute of […]
The Standards Approach

As developers in the field we want to follow the standards emerging for the web and for data. For the challenges our field faces, we often combine RESTful API practices, CORS, Web Annotation, Web Components, IIIF, JSON, JSON-LD, and Linked Open Data standards together so that APIs and applications we create are automatically applicable to […]
Auth + Attribution of Open Data

Open Data is supposed to be accessible without any constraints to availability. The idea of authentication around Open Data is an oxymoron, but in practice we have found great benefit for keeping track of who can claim ownership to an object and how we can use ownership to put natural restrictions on the openness of […]

Any new web service or application must take a considered look at authorization, authentication, and attribution—authorization, to make changes to data; authentication, to ensure those making changes are known; and attribution, to apply proper credit for contributions. The prevailing practice is to authenticate users within applications and using appropriate context to make attributions. Popular transcription […]
Deleted Objects in RERUM

In the last post, we explored how the tree of the version history is healed around a deleted object. In this post, we look more directly at the transformations to the deleted object itself. Let’s take the same abbreviated object to begin: The Case for Breadcrumbs Because we are removing it from the versioning, the […]
Forgetting Deleted Objects in RERUM

At the Walter J. Ong, S.J. Center for Digital Humanities, we have been working hard on RERUM, the public object repository for IIIF, Web Annotation, and other JSON documents. The latest feature we’ve been diving into for the 1.0 release is DELETE. As is covered in the documentation on Github, there are a few guiding […]
Versioning in RERUM

Versioning as it is known in software is simply the process of preserving previous iterations of a document when changes are made. There are many systems available to the developer which differ in centralization, cloning behaviors, delta encoding, etc., but for our purposes, the philosophy and utility should suffice. From a mile up, versioning resembles […]
Editing Remote Objects in RERUM

View full catalogue record One use case that has recently captured our imagination in the Center is that posed by the updating of otherwise inaccessible objects. For example, if a user found a transcription annotation at the Wellcome Library which they wanted to update, but there was no accessible annotation service mentioned, that user may […]