Control on the right to create annotation

Jacob Palme writes:
 > Do I understand that the intention is to allow anoyone to create
 > annotations on any web document, and that these annotations will
 > then be visible to anyone who looks at the web document?

Yes, that is some peoples' intention.  It is a bold proposal with
many ramifications regarding freedom of speech.

 > Can this be implemented without support from the web server for
 > the document being annotated?

Depends.  If support of the server *is* required to achieve public
annotations, then support might be denied thus denying free speech.  We
should never impose a requirement on servers that they must provide this
support, so some alternative must be found.

For the same reason, it is also not sufficient to require annotation
support in near-by servers, such as those up the chain to the DNS
root, or in an associated annotation server.  One might set up a
parallel DNS tree for annotation services, but this potentially has
the same problem since every server might have some legal power
over the corresponding annotation server.

At the same time, if a server or document *wanted* to advertise an
annotation service, that should be allowed too.  This is basically
what I recommended in my Scalable Annotations paper.

One alternative that allows unconstrained public annotations of any
documents is that many annotation servers may be set up with
annotation sets for particular sets of documents.  Users first find
the annotation sets that are appropriate for their interests, and then
ask for annotations when visiting documents.  This is basically what
Martin recommended in his Third Party paper.  It is also the same as
my Group Annotation servers, where the groups allow anyone in the world.

--
Daniel LaLiberte (liberte@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
http://union.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~liberte/

Received on Wednesday, 21 August 1996 15:19:16 UTC