Friendly-Practices

While your application may do whatever is best for your own use, there are a few suggestions to make your information discoverable, readable, and perhaps more interesting to others:

Object types

RERUM prefers to store OAC and IIIF objects when possible. Specific tools built in the future will focus on managing these types of objects. New support will be added as standards are created for non-image object types. You will see in the equivalency table that RERUM primarily expects Manifests, Sequences, Canvases, and Annotations.

Resources, such as audio, images, text files, 3D models, etc. should be referred to in the annotations, but stored by a repository more appropriate for their hosting and conservation. RERUM is not intended to be your complete database and is not suitable for sensitive user data, passwords, or large blobs.

Private and Reserved Properties

Applications using RERUM should expect that other applications may have placed “private” properties on some objects as a shortut or application-specific property. These should be used sparingly and removed before saving or updating whenever possible. Please lead with _underscore and consider if your property should be _rr_namespaced to avoid collision. Similarly, expect that common contexts will be used and names like @context and resources may lead to irrelevant discovery or unintentional over-writing by others.

Vocabularies

If possible, use a well trod vocabulary for your data and include a reference to a context file in your objects. If your application is generating data that may be best understood in several vocabularies, feel free to let your robots proliferate annotations describing the date (for example) in ways beyond your local use, for the purpose of improving discoverability.

Versioning

RERUM allows an application to bypass the typical versioning that maintains the history of an annotation, but this should be used rationally. If a change really is an insignificant update (such as saving as a user types in a short input), consider holding the API call until a sync cycle when your application is more sure of the user’s commitment to their annotation. More information about versioning is available in the API documentation.