The object of the relationship is the end point of a service that conforms to the [annotation-protocol], and it may be associated with any resource. The expectation of asserting the relationship is that the object is the preferred service for maintaining annotations about the subject resource, according to the publisher of the relationship.

This relationship is intended to be used both within Linked Data descriptions and as the rel type of a Link, via HTTP Link Headers [rfc5988] for binary resources and in HTML <link> elements. For more information about these, please see the Annotation Protocol specification [annotation-protocol].

Any resource may link to an Annotation Container when Annotations on the resource should be created within the referenced Container. This link is carried in an HTTP Link header and the value of the rel parameter must be http://www.w3.org/ns/oa#annotationService.

For HTML representations of resources, the equivalent link tag in the header of the document may also be used.