Thing > Annotation > Region > Interval > Span

Definition	An annotation over a region in primary text data. A Span may be defined by pointing directly into primary data (by using start and end offsets) or by linking to one or more other Annotations with the targets property.
URI	http://mmif.clams.ai/0.2.1/vocabulary/Span

Metadata

Metadata from Region

Property	Type	Description
unit	String	The unit used to determine boundaries. For text regions this is typically *offsets* to indicate character offsets, for images this is could be *pixels*, and for audio or video streams *seconds*, *milliseconds*, *timestamps* or *frames*.

Metadata from Annotation

Property	Type	Description
document	ID	The identifier of the document that the annotation is over. This has to be defined either at the metadata level, in which case it has scope over all annotations of the same type in a view, or at the instance level, in which it has scope over just the single annotation.

Properties

Properties from Interval

Property	Type	Description
start	Integer	The starting offset in the primary data. What unit is used is determined by the *unit* metadata property.
end	Integer	The ending offset in the primary data. What unit is used is determined by the *unit* metadata property.
targets	List of IDs	IDs of a sequence of annotations covering the region of primary data referred to by this annotation. Used as an alternative to *start* and *end* to point to component annotations (for example a token sequence) rather than directly into primary data, or to link two or more annotations (for example in a coreference annotation).

Properties from Annotation

Property	Type	Description
document	ID	The identifier of the document that the annotation is over.

Properties from Thing

Property	Type	Description
id	ID	A unique identifier for the annotation or document. Uniqueness is relative to the view the annotation is in or the list of documents at the top level of a MMIF file. [Required]