Re: Annotea futures? Annotation standards in 2009...

Hi Dan,

You might want to look at our <http://code.google.com/p/caboto/> project 
which was a small spin-out effort from 3 projects each with a social 
software annotations aspect.

We looked at use cases from different contexts and but this has not really 
been about annotating parts of a page but more about annotating resources 
(with a dedicated 'page') such as "an event", or making a time-based video 
annotation.

Nikki

--On 22 May 2009 16:00 +0200 Dan Brickley <[email protected]> wrote:

> (I'm cc:'ing 3 lists, rather warily; if the thread gets long, please
> consider trimming it to just use [email protected])
>
> Hi all
>
> I'm involved in helping advise a new not-for-profit project that is close
> in approach to the old Annotea project, looking at annotations within
> pieces of Web content, and their cross-linking, threading for discussion
> etc. It's now 2009, over ten years since the original Annotea designs.
> The Web has changed a lot since then, but the need to annotate it doesn't
> seem to have gone away.
>
> See http://annotea.org/
> http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/User/Tutorial/quicktutorial and nearby for
> an overview of Annotea.
>
> Since then Web 2.0 has happened, and now many of the original themes of
> Annotea are part of the mainstream Web developer perspective. And yet ...
> looking at the comments to this 2007 techcrunch survey -
> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/04/10/5-ways-to-mark-up-the-web/ - I see
> project after project, startup after startup, exploring this space
> without any great emphasis on data exchange standards. I guess many of
> them have APIs, probably a lot of them use RSS or Atom feeds. But we
> certainly haven't yet to the place imagined by Annotea: an annotation
> layer for the Web that allows comments, scribbles, reviews, discussions
> to be freely interlinked and overlaid using open standard formats and
> protocols.
>
> So I'm mailing the relevant (and pretty quiet) lists but cc:'ing
> [email protected] too to ask where folk thing this stuff is heading.
>
> When is an annotation an annotation, versus a page that happens to be a
> review, or happens to have as it's primary topic another page? For
> annotations at the page level, it might be that mainstream RDF work
> (linked data etc) has fulfilled some of the early promise of Annotea.
>
> But for the "annotating parts of a page" scenario that lies at the heart
> of many people's notion of annotations, there doesn't seem to be much
> happening in terms of practical and widely adopted standards. Lots of
> startups, experiments etc but they all seem to be islands. And since
> annotation systems are only really interesting when you have enough
> annotations to get decent coverage, this seems a pity.
>
> Thoughts? Am I missing some developments? What would Annotea look like if
> rebuilt for the Web of 2009? If it's in RDF, the query part would just
> use SPARQL, and topic classification would be SKOS. What else? Is there
> implementation experience from Annotea adopters and implementors gathered
> somewhere? Is there consensus for example on the best bits of information
> to keep if you want a robust reference to a piece of a potentially
> evolving page? How well do modern Web design habits (CSS, Ajax etc)
> interact with the overlay of 3rd party annotations? Is everyone using
> Firefox addons, javascript bookmarklets and Web proxies or is there some
> hope for a cross-browser approach on the horizon?
>
> thanks for any suggestions, thoughts, links etc.
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
>
>
>



----------------------
NJ Rogers, Technical Researcher
(Senior Technical Developer and Coordinator of Web Futures)
Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT)
Email:[email protected]
Tel: +44(0)117 3314412 (Direct)
Tel: +44(0)117 3314430 (Office)