Spans
Any span of any document on PubAnnotation may be accessed through its own URI, e.g.,
https://pubannotation.org/docs/sourcedb/PubMed/sourceid/25314077/spans/0-86
We call it a span URI.
Note that, in a span URI, the document is specified, e.g. ‘/docs/sourcedb/PubMed/sourceid/25314077’, and the span is specified, e.g. ‘/spans/0-86’.
The span specification of PubAnnotation is based on caret (text cursor) positions.
In the above example, the string ‘protein’ exists between the caret positions 4 and 11, thus its span specifications will be ‘/span/4-11’.
PubAnnotation provides a GUI to get the URI of any span:
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Open a document page
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Select a span, then the URI of the span will appear below the document.
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Click the URL to open the document page with the selected span highlighted.
Once a span URI is obtained, annotations to the span can be accessed by adding ‘/annotations’ to the URL:
https://pubannotation.org/docs/sourcedb/PubMed/sourceid/25314077/spans/0-86/annotations
The annotations also can be accessed in JSON:
https://pubannotation.org/docs/sourcedb/PubMed/sourceid/25314077/spans/0-86/annotations.json
or in a visualization (TextAE):
https://pubannotation.org/docs/sourcedb/PubMed/sourceid/25314077/spans/0-86/annotations/visualize
Note that, to the same document, annotations may be produced by more than one projects, and all of them will be shown by accessing the above URLs.
The annotations from a specific project can be accessed by specifying the project in the URL as in:
for HTML rendering, or
for JSON representation.
The latter can be supplied to a project specification as a sample annotation.
Also, it can be given to TextAE for visualization, e.g. https://textae.pubannotation.org/editor.html?target=https://pubannotation.org/projects/example/docs/sourcedb/PubMed/sourceid/25314077/spans/0-86/annotations.json