IIIF Content Search API

[Alexandre Bisetti]

Hello all,

I would like to know if it is possible to perform an annotation search in a collection and not in a manifest. It is well specified in the documentation that "The scope of the specification is searching annotation content within a single IIIF resource, such as a Manifest, Range or Collection", but I cannot find any information as to the expected response format after such research.

Thank you for your answers.

Alexandre Bisetti.

[Tom Crane]

Hello Alexandre,

The important difference when offering a search over a Collection, rather than a Manifest, is that the canvases targeted in the results are not part of the Collection resource the search service was provided for.

If a client such as Universal Viewer or Mirador loads a manifest with a search service, it already has all the canvases that the results point to.

A client interacting with a search over a Collection needs an extra piece of information to generate a useful experience for the user - the URL of the manifest that each search result's canvas lives in. This can be provided via the within property.

Example of a normal search result, returned by a content search service that belongs to a manifest:

{ 

  "@id": "http://example.org/identifier/annotation/anno-line", 

  "@type": "oa:Annotation", 

  "motivation": "sc:painting", 

  "resource": { 

         "@type": "cnt:ContentAsText", 

          "chars": "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" 

  }, 

  "on": "http://example.org/identifier/canvas1#xywh=100,100,250,20" 

  }

http://example.org/identifier/canvas1 is part of the manifest the client has already loaded.

Example of a search result that also provides the manifest:

{ 

  "@id": "http://example.org/identifier/annotation/anno-line", 

  "@type": "oa:Annotation", 

  "motivation": "sc:painting", 

  "resource": { 

         "@type": "cnt:ContentAsText", 

          "chars": "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" 

  }, 

  "on": {

      "@id": "http://example.org/identifier/canvas1#xywh=100,100,250,20",

      "@type": "sc:Canvas",

      "within": {

         "@id": "http://example.org/identifier/manifest1",

         "@type": "sc:Manifest",

         "label": "A label would be useful, too"

      }

  }

This allows results from different manifests to be returned in the same set of results; the client can follow the manifest links if it wants to, and find the canvases referred to.

See https://iiif.io/api/search/1.0/#target-resource-structure for more details.

This extra information would be essential in a discovery environment, searching across a collection. Thumbnails would be useful, too.

Tom

[Alexandre Bisetti]

Hello,

Thank you for your answer, I will take a more detailed look to this part of the documentation.

Alexandre Bisetti.