STAM webservice with WebAPI (stamd)

[proycon]

As the tooling around STAM is reaching more maturity, it would be a relatively small step now to develop a higher-level WebAPI that exposes some of the functionality via a webservice. Communication would largely proceed by GET/POST of a STAMQL query.

The webservice (let's call it stamd), would load one or more annotation stores into memory and serve requests. It would be somewhat comparable in function to both TextRepo & AnnoRepo. Do to the nature of the current library, however, the implementation would be strictly memory-bound, which might make it less scalable to huge data collections.

The service would be kept pretty lightweight without features such as user authentication (that can be taken care of in a wrapper).

[proycon]

An early version is implemented at https://github.com/annotation/stamd now. All it does for now is load a specified annotation model from disk into memory, and serve it as a webservice so it can be queried with STAMQL via the query/ endpoint.

[proycon]

Some further things to implement:

• JSON errors
• A multistore that loads/unloads annotation stores as they are used
• Query API (STAMQL)
• Mutable queries
• Directly return HTML visualisations (driven by request content type)
• Directly return plain text (driven by request content type)
• Directly return web annotations (driven by request content type) (model after w3c annorepo API?)
• Auto-generated OpenAPI specification
• Upload API
• List API

[proycon]

• Improve requests and responses to be streaming where appropriate
• Improve web annotation output with automatically set base URIs
• Implement more of the W3C Web Annotation Protocol, most notably listing annotations in stores (Annotation Containers) using AnnotationPage.