GMEOW Notes & Annotation Module

• IRI: https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/slices/notes
• Tier: extension
• Group: extensions

What This Slice Covers

This slice owns 31 terms and contributes 39 mapping or projection rows. Use it when its terms match the native fact you want to preserve; use the linkage tables to see how those facts leave GMEOW for consumer vocabularies.

Dependencies

• gmeow:slices/evidence
• gmeow:slices/kernel

Consumers

• PKM annotations (annotation target span) over core evidence spans; Web Annotation projection.

Local Map

Examples

Annotations And Notes

• Source: slices/extensions/notes/examples/annotations-and-notes.ttl
• GMEOW terms: gmeow:Annotation, gmeow:Comment, gmeow:CreativeWork, gmeow:Highlight, gmeow:Note, gmeow:Person, gmeow:Selector, gmeow:annotationMotivation, gmeow:annotationTarget, gmeow:annotationTargetSpan
• External prefixes: xsd

# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2026 Blackcat Informatics® Inc. <paudley@blackcatinformatics.ca>
# SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0
#
# Worked example: notes and annotations. A gmeow:Note is a first-class
# information object — authored, timestamped, and linked to other notes by
# gmeow:hasWikilink and to entities by gmeow:mentions (the Zettelkasten / linked-
# note pattern). A gmeow:Highlight is the W3C-Web-Annotation shape for pure
# highlighting: a gmeow:annotationTarget, a precise gmeow:annotationTargetSpan
# (a text-quote Selector), and a gmeow:annotationMotivation — but NO body (a
# highlight just marks a span; for an annotation that says something, a body-
# bearing gmeow:Annotation subclass is used). A gmeow:Comment is a Note that
# threads under a parent.
@prefix gmeow: <https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/> .
@prefix ex:    <https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/examples/notes/> .
@prefix xsd:   <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .

ex:dana a gmeow:Person ; gmeow:name "Dana Reyes"@en .
ex:paper a gmeow:CreativeWork ; gmeow:title "A Survey of Transformer Architectures"@en .

# --- A linked note: authored, mentions an entity, wikilinks to another note.
ex:note1 a gmeow:Note ;
    gmeow:noteAuthor    ex:dana ;
    gmeow:noteContent   "Transformers replaced RNNs for most NLP tasks by 2020." ;
    gmeow:noteCreatedAt "2026-06-10T08:00:00Z"^^xsd:dateTime ;
    gmeow:hasWikilink   ex:note2 ;
    gmeow:mentions      ex:paper .

ex:note2 a gmeow:Note ;
    gmeow:noteAuthor  ex:dana ;
    gmeow:noteContent "The attention mechanism is the core idea." .

# --- A highlight on the paper: it pins WHICH span via annotationTargetSpan (a
#     Selector) and is motivated by highlighting — a pure target+span binding,
#     no body (that is the Highlight contract).
ex:highlight a gmeow:Highlight ;
    gmeow:annotationTarget     ex:paper ;
    gmeow:annotationTargetSpan ex:span ;
    gmeow:annotationMotivation gmeow:motivationHighlighting .

ex:span a gmeow:Selector ;
    gmeow:selectorTextQuote "the attention mechanism scales quadratically with sequence length" .

# --- A comment threading under the paper (a Comment IS a Note).
ex:comment a gmeow:Comment ;
    gmeow:noteAuthor    ex:dana ;
    gmeow:noteContent   "Does this hold for very long sequences?" ;
    gmeow:commentParent ex:paper .

Terms

Classes

Properties

Individuals

Linkages

• Rows: 39
• Projection profiles: activitystreams, markdown, schema-org, web-annotation
• External vocabularies: as, dcterms, foaf, oa, rdf, schema, sioc

Guide

Notes & Annotation — alignment & projection reference

The first-class annotation and personal-knowledge-management layer. A person's digital existence includes their notes — annotations, highlights, bookmarks, comments, and the linked web of thought (Zettelkasten / PKM). This slice unifies scattered GMEOW pieces (documents, sources, EvidenceSpan, aboutness, standpoint) into a coherent annotation layer that reuses, never duplicates existing constructs.

Everything here is authored once in mapping-dsl/ and generated by gmeow compile-mappings (Principle 4); nothing in mappings/, projections/, or queries/projections/ is hand-edited.

Core design

1. A Note is content; an Annotation binds it to a target (the W3C Web Annotation idiom: Body / Target / Motivation). A highlight = target + selector, no body; a bookmark = motivatedBy bookmarking; a comment = a Note replying to a target.
2. One selector model, reused. The annotation target's selector is the EvidenceSpan / Selector (text quote, text position, page, locator). Selector is a subclass of EvidenceSpan; no second selector model is minted.
3. Aboutness is a Tagging, not a string. A note's topic reuses isAbout / Tagging from the tags building block.
4. Backlinks are first-class and bidirectional (the RDF gap): mentions / mentionedIn (inverse), relatedNote (symmetric) — kept out of OWL cardinality for DL regularity.
5. Perspectival + suppressible: notes are accordingTo-indexed; a retracted note sets displayable false, never deleted (Principle 10).

Terms at a glance

SSSOM alignments (mapping-dsl/equivalences/notes.ttl)

All by reference (Principle 5) — GMEOW never imports an external axiom. Compiled to mappings/gmeow-notes.sssom.tsv.

Projections — the four-artifact stack

W3C Web Annotation → queries/projections/web-annotation.rq

Re-expresses GMEOW Annotation / Highlight / Bookmark / Comment as oa:Annotation. Standpoint, provenance, confidence, temporal scope, and suppression state are dropped; the projection is intentionally flat (no dcterms:creator emitted).

schema.org → queries/projections/schema-org.rq

Re-expresses Note → schema:NoteDigitalDocument (Comments included by subsumption).

ActivityStreams → queries/projections/activitystreams.rq

Re-expresses Note → as:Note for fediverse / decentralized syndication.

Markdown / [[wikilink]] → queries/projections/markdown.rq

The GMEOW-native bridge to Obsidian / Logseq PKM interop. Projects mentions and relatedNote to a flat gmeow:hasWikilink graph.

⚠️ Brutally lossy. This projection drops ALL metadata: standpoint, confidence, temporal scope, suppression state, aboutness, tagging. Only the directed (mentions) and undirected (relatedNote) wikilink edges survive. The round-trip from RDF → Markdown → RDF cannot recover the rich annotation layer; it is a deliberate downcast for human PKM consumption (Principle 4).

PKM round-trip guide

Obsidian / Logseq conventions. A note file is a Markdown document. Wikilinks are [[Note Title]] or [[Note Title|Display Text]]. GMEOW projects a note's rdfs:label or noteContent first line as the file title, and its mentions / relatedNote edges as wikilinks in the markdown body. On re-ingest, the markdown parser mints gmeow:Note individuals and gmeow:mentions edges; the original provenance, standpoint, and confidence are not recoverable and must be re-asserted by the ingestion pipeline if needed.

Term reference

gmeow:Note · gmeow:noteContent · gmeow:noteAuthor · gmeow:noteCreatedAt · gmeow:noteModifiedAt

The content layer — an annotation body, Zettelkasten card, comment, or standalone thought, grounded as an InformationObject. noteContent carries the flat 80%-case text/markdown; noteAuthor (non-functional) the flat authorship shortcut, promotable to a reified Participation when the act needs period, confidence, or standpoint (P9); noteCreatedAt/noteModifiedAt are lightweight four-clock timestamps.

gmeow:Annotation · gmeow:annotationBody · gmeow:annotationTarget · gmeow:annotationTargetSpan · gmeow:annotationMotivation

A reified binding of a body to a target with a motivation — the W3C Web Annotation idiom as a gufo:Relator. annotationBody (functional, optional — highlights and bookmarks have none) names the note; annotationTarget (functional) the annotated entity; annotationTargetSpan (non-functional) reuses EvidenceSpan, no second selector model minted; annotationMotivation (functional) the purpose, no value privileged.

gmeow:Highlight · gmeow:Bookmark

Specialized annotations: a Highlight marks an anchored span and carries no body (a pure target+selector binding motivated by highlighting); a Bookmark records a target resource for later retrieval, typically with no body or selector.

gmeow:Comment · gmeow:commentParent · gmeow:hasReply · gmeow:hasDirectReply

A Note that replies to an annotation or another comment — a threaded discussion node. commentParent names the one thing replied to (range Entity, so any annotatable entity may be a parent); hasDirectReply (inverse of commentParent) is the immediate reply, and its transitive superproperty hasReply reaches the full reply tree, kept free of OWL cardinality for DL regularity.

gmeow:mentions · gmeow:mentionedIn · gmeow:relatedNote · gmeow:hasWikilink

The first-class bidirectional backlink graph (the RDF/PKM gap). mentions is the directed edge from a note to an entity; mentionedIn (its inverse) the backlink view, materialized never hand-maintained; relatedNote (symmetric) an undirected associative link; hasWikilink a Markdown/PKM round-trip edge projected from the others, not asserted canonically.

gmeow:AnnotationMotivation

The purpose for which an annotation is created — a VALUE vocabulary (individuals, never subclasses) aligned to the W3C Web Annotation motivation set: describing, commenting, highlighting, bookmarking, tagging, linking, questioning, replying, assessing, moderating. Co-equal and open: no motivation is primary or default.

Verified by construction

• gmeow compile-mappings --check — no drift between mapping-dsl/ and generated artifacts.
• tests/test_notes.py — structural, SHACL, projection-parse, and orthogonality guards.
• ELK / HermiT (make reason) — the backlink graph (inverse + symmetric, no cardinality) stays OWL 2 DL regular.