Re: Combining collaboration and annotation

On Mon, 22 Jul 1996, Jacob Palme wrote:

> Are really WWW collaboration and WWW annotation two different
> work items?

Well during last year's W3C meeting on the subject, annotation was a
form of collaboration. 

Annotation is not necesarily shared.  Private annotations have some
value external to the more general issues of collaboration. I think
in the original discussion, annotations were viewed as commentary on
content not owned or controlled by the annotator.

The technical issues I see are the correlation between arbitrary 
content in all its various complex forms.  Once the annotation is 
created in the context of a collaboration support system, I would
expect a bit more structure and control which would leave annotations
as just one form of collaborative comment which should have the full
power of the Collab system to support general discussion.

Of course, since we are at the instant talking about a web deployed
collaboration support system, it could also be the target of 
annotations of arbitrary material.

I believe this one way connection to arbitrary material is what 
distinguishes annotations from general discussion.  The arbitrary
connection is probably not the most effective way to comment within
a collaborative support system.

Two examples of private annotation in current products may be found
in the Quarterdeck WWW browser and in ZooWorks. Both allow users to
make private notes to themselves. Useful and necessary in a group
support context and also not sufficient for the full power of group
collaboration.

Dave Morris

Received on Monday, 22 July 1996 21:23:09 UTC