The Digital Scholarship development team for the Research Computing Group at Saint Louis University is pleased to offer a new tool for integrating the RERUM annotation service with the Mirador viewer. The RERUM Adapter for Mirador is a small plugin that allows users of the Mirador Annotation tool to save their annotations to the RERUM annotation service. This allows for the annotations to be shared across other tools and platforms that use the RERUM service or understand standard Linked Open Data.

The Mirador Annotations plugin allows users to create and edit annotations on images and other media. The RERUM Adapter for Mirador extends this functionality by providing a way to save these annotations to the RERUM annotation service. Depending on your project, the Adapter can be adjusted to specific needs.

Sandbox

By default, loading the Adapter as configured connects to the RERUM sandbox service. This is a public service that does not promise data integrity or persistence but is reliable over short periods for experimentation. This is very useful for testing and development and available without any setup or additional resources.

TinyThings

The Adapter uses the tinydev.rerum.io sandbox, but there is also available a tiny.rerum.io service that instead connects to the production server. This small change to the endpointUrl in the code will allow you to save annotations in a more permanent location. This can be done directly in the constructor:

constructor(canvasId, 'https://tiny.rerum.io', 'https://store.rerum.io/v1/id/agent')

As you can see, the change can also be made by simply using the TinyThings URL in the annotation configuration. This short code block shows how to set up the Adapter with the TinyThings service:

const config = {
  annotation: {
    adapter: (canvasId) => new RerumAdapter(canvasId,'https://tiny.rerum.io', 'https://store.rerum.io/v1/id/agent'),
    exportLocalStorageAnnotations: false, // display annotation JSON export button
  },
  id: 'demo',
  window: {
    defaultSideBarPanel: 'annotations',
    sideBarOpenByDefault: true,
  },
  windows: [{
    loadedManifest: 'https://iiif.harvardartmuseums.org/manifests/object/299843',
  }],
};

Similar to the sandbox, the TinyThings service is available without any setup or additional resources. However, there are a few caveats to be aware of.

1. TinyThings is production data and Linked Open Data. Polluting it with test data or bad data is poor web citizenship.
2. The metadata for the annotations is controlled by the TinyThings service, so your project will not have any reserved control or explicit authentication.
3. The result of this solution is expected to be transitional and is probably not suitable for long-term projects.

MyThings

TinyThings is designed to be forked. The GitHub repository can be cloned and run with your own API key (register here) so that your project owns the data. To implement your solution, simply replace the endpointUrl in the Adapter constructor with your own URL as in the TinyThings example above. In fact, it is possible to spin up your own instance of the RERUM service as well and still use the Adapter with the same configuration without exposing any of your data in an uncontrolled space.

Notes on the Adapter

There is an outstanding issue that will add a lot of flexibility to the Adapter. The Bearer token passthrough will allow for the use of the API key with TinyThings. The provided Authorization header will replace the default header that identifies the TinyThings service and so connects the production data to your project. This introduces a lot of concerns about security of tokens, but simplifies the resources needed, if solvable.

The creator field is added to all annotations as a common field within RERUM and other Web Annotations, but has a default value set. For any of the above solutions, you can set the creator field to a value that identifies your project or user. Because this is set on initialization, it cannot support multiple users or projects in the same instance.